[Mailman-Users] Mail Man Help

[Barry Finkel]

Patrick Bogen replied to some posting:

>(Also, Ubuntu should have a fairly recent version of Mailman in its
>repositories. Are you using that, or did you download the source?)

I have installed mailman_2.1.5-9ubuntu4.1 for testing. I installed via

     apt-get install mailman

As I was not sure how this differed from the mailman-2.1.8 I had
installed from the CVS repositories on a test Solaris box, I copied the
installed files from both boxes to a common place and did a
comparison.  (In a previous posting about a week ago I had mistakenly
said that Ubuntu did not supply the source.  I was wrong, as I was
looking for .c and not .py files.)

I compared the source, and there are 205 files that are in both. Of
these 205 files, 122 compare and 83 have differences.  I do not know
the source(s) of these differences.  Is there 2.1.8 code that has not
been ported to the Ubuntu 2.1.5-9?  Is there code that Ubuntu (or its
"source" Debian) has written that has not been sent to Free Software
Foundation?  Note that neither has the latest security patch installed.

I found source in one but not the other:

     In Ubuntu/Debian but not in 2.1.8:

          mailman/bin/postfix-to-mailman.py
          mailman/bin/qmail-to-mailman.py
          mailman/mail/wrapper
          mailman/Mailman/Cgi/savannah
          mailman/Mailman/Handlers/SpamAssassin.py
          mailman/Mailman/Handlers/spamd.py

     In 2.1.8 but not in Ubuntu/Debian:

          mailman/bin/reset_pw.py
          mailman/pythonlib/
          mailman/tests/

As a result, I know that I have the 2.1.5 base, but I have no idea what
I have installed on Ubuntu past that base.  The Ubuntu/Debian change
log cannot be compared to the 2.1.8 CVS change log, as the U/D changes
have their own tracking numbers, and the short descriptions of the
changes do not compare.
The Ubuntu copyright file has this text:

     This package was debianized by Johnie Ingram (johnie at debian.org)
     on Tue, 16 Jun 1998 22:34:13 -0400.

     It was downloaded from:
             http://www.list.org/

     Package was maintained by Gergely Madarasz <gorgo at caesar.elte.hu>
     Package now maintained by Tollef Fog Heen <tfheen at debian.org>

I do not know what was needed to "debianize" the code; I would have
assumed that the code from the FSF would run on any Linux without
modification.  If any mods were needed, the FSF developers would
be told and integrate any needed changes into their source tree.
I could envision a few changes, maybe to install mailman into different
directories to match the Debian standards, but 83 modules that are
different seems to be too many.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Barry S. Finkel
Computing and Information Systems Division
Argonne National Laboratory          Phone:    +1 (630) 252-7277
9700 South Cass Avenue               Facsimile:+1 (630) 252-4601
Building 222, Room D209              Internet: BSFinkel at anl.gov
Argonne, IL   60439-4828             IBMMAIL:  I1004994