[Mailman-Users] Difficulties with mailman 2.1.5

[Brad Knowles]

At 3:10 PM -0500 11/17/06, Alan McConnell wrote:

>  Hi, Brad,  I've been silent, uncourteously not thanking you
>  for your helpful message, because I wanted to act on
>  your suggestions before replying.

Not a problem.  I appreciate your attention to detail.

>  I have been in touch with the tech staff at PatriotNet(to
>  whom I'm cc-ing this, and they have responded that they
>  are running Debian, with its well-known system of upgrades,
>  security fixes, etc.  I run Debian at home, so I know a
>  little about this.

While I don't consider myself a Linux person, I have some familiarity 
with Debian, and I understand the desire to have software fully 
checked out before upgrading as well as wanting to have the upgrade 
process be as bullet-proof as possible.

I was the Sr. Internet Mail Administrator for AOL for a couple of 
years, and I know what it's like to manage hundreds of systems with a 
small staff.  I only managed our small piece of the overall system, 
but I worked closely with the configuration management guys, so I 
understand what that's like.

>>  On first blush, this sounds a lot like the problem discussed in FAQ
>
>	I now can log in without repeating the process.

Cool.  That's good to hear.

>>  My guess is that this is related to issue #1 above, and if you can
>>  get that problem fixed then this one seems that it would be likely to
>>  also go away.
>
>	I haven't added anyone recently.  I'll monitor this.

If you have any further problems, please let us know.

>>  One thing that would help is if your ISP was running the latest
>>  version of Mailman -- we're now on version 2.1.9.  There have been a
>
>	Yes.  My question, addressed to you, or to any Debian
>	experts here is:  using the Debian upgrade/update system,
>	will the improvements of 2.1.9 by now have propagated to
>	the PatriotNet system?  Debian puts a big focus on security.
>	But, as I indicated above, it does seem that the system
>	is better now.   (However the bottom LH corner of the admin
>	screens still say version 2.1.5  !  ? )

I'm most certainly not a Debian expert, so in that respect I'm not 
sure I can answer this question.  I do know that there have been some 
issues in the past with getting the updates pushed out to some sites 
running Debian, especially if they're running older Debian releases 
for which new packages are not being built.

Moreover, Debian has made a number of changes to the code they ship 
out with our name on it, and we can't be responsible for them.

This process is getting better, and we have recently started having 
the Debian package maintainers contributing the relevant portions of 
their changes back to us, for future inclusion in our code base. 
There will be at least some convergence, at least in the future.


In the meanwhile, if you're still having issues, then I don't see 
many alternatives.  You can either choose to run the Debian package 
version of Mailman (in which case we're not going to be able to help 
you with certain classes of problems), or you can run the version 
installed directly from our source tarballs.

If you do choose to stick with the Debian package version, then your 
first level of support should be from the Debian community and 
especially the Debian package maintainer(s).  If you're having 
certain problems and they can prove that those problems are not a 
result of the code changes they've made, then we might be able to 
help.

But the only version of Mailman that we can officially support is the 
version we provide in our tarballs from our official sites.  We can 
make a best effort to try to support other versions of Mailman as 
modified by other organizations, but there's going to be a limit to 
what we can do in that regard.


I'm sorry I don't have a better answer for you.

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad at shub-internet.org>

Trend Micro has announced that they will cancel the stop.mail-abuse.org
mail forwarding service as of 15 November 2006.  If you have an old
e-mail account for me at this domain, please make sure you correct that
with the current address.