[Mailman-Users] Hint: mmdsr.sh and Mac OS X Leopard

[Brad Knowles]

On 1/6/08, Jeffrey Goldberg wrote:

>  Isn't this the kind of thing that can be dealt with in the configure
>  script?  I don't know the autoconf tools, but I thought that this was
>  the sort of problem it was designed to address.

For mmdsr, there is no "configure" script.  I wrote mmdsr to help me 
administer the mailing lists on python.org (and other sites), and it 
was useful enough that I decided that I would make it available to 
others.  But it's a complete hack of a Bourne shell script that has 
evolved over time, and is not integrated in any way into the standard 
part of the Mailman installation process.

This is an officially unsupported tool that is provided in a totally 
separate subdirectory, and if you choose to install and use it at 
your site, then you do so in the understanding of the basic nature of 
the tool and the fact that it is officially unsupported.

>  And I'd like to give another warning about standard Unix tools on OS X.
>  You can very easily end up with out of date man pages.  When a system
>  is upgraded (using an "upgrade install" instead of a "clean" or "archive"
>  install) you will get new compressed man pages.  For example,
>  /usr/share/man/man1/sort.1.gz  But if you already have
>  /usr/share/man/man1/sort.1 you will end up with both files.  man will
>  not detect that the .1 file is older than the .1.gz file.  As a result

So far as I know, we have no man pages for Mailman, and there are no 
man pages for mmdsr.  This really isn't relevant to this discussion.

>     man sort
>
>  may give you the man page for a version of sort that is no longer on
>  your system.  I'd discovered this a few months ago (I'd long known that
>  many man pages didn't correspond to what I was using, but I hadn't
>  understood why), so when this happened with sort.1 as I read this
>  discussion, I at least knew what was happening.  My old sort.1 page was
>  from August 2005.

Then you've got a screwed up man(1) command, because it should be 
smart enough to look at date/time stamps of the source versus the 
output text files, and if the source is newer then it should 
re-generate the output text file.

-- 
Brad Knowles <brad at shub-internet.org>
LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>