[Mailman-Users] configure mailman on Solaris 8

[Richard Barrett]

At 13:48 05/09/2002 -0700, George Crum wrote:
>Hello,
>I'm having trouble getting configure to run on a Solaris 8 server.  Here is
>the configure command that I issue and the resulting error.
>
>./configure --prefix=/export/home/mailman --with-mail-gid=25
>--with-cgi-gid=1004
>
>checking for --with-var-prefix... no
>checking for --with-username... mailman
>checking for mailman UID... Traceback (most recent call last):
>   File "conftest.py", line 1, in ?
>     import pwd, string
>ImportError: No module named pwd
>cat: cannot open conftest.out
>
>configure: error:
>***** No "mailman" user found!
>***** Your system must have a "mailman" user defined
>***** (usually in your /etc/passwd file).  Please see the INSTALL
>***** file for details.
>
>I have created the user mailman and a group called mailman.  Plus created
>the home directory /export/home/mailman.
>
>Has anyone out there compiled Mailman on Solaris 8?
>
>- George Crum

This looks line a python installation problem and not a Mailman specific 
problem.

pwd is a standard python module used to access the password database on 
Unix systems and the error message you are getting is python saying that 
the module cannot be imported.

You can confirm (or deny) this proposition by running python from the 
command line and trying to use pwd. For instance on my test system I get:

[testsys!/u/barrett]:python
Python 1.5.2 (#12, Oct 15 1999, 16:24:36) [C] on sunos5
Copyright 1991-1995 Stichting Mathematisch Centrum, Amsterdam
 >>> import pwd
 >>> pwd.getpwnam('barrett')
('barrett', 'x', 500, 101, 'Richard Barrett', '/u/barrett', 
'/usr/local/bin/bash')
 >>> pwd.getpwnam('mailman')
('mailman', 'x', 601, 601, 'Mailman Maillist Manager account', 
'/u/mailman', '/usr/local/bin/bash')
 >>>

If you get an import failure after typing the import pwd line then you need 
to look to your python installation for the problem.