[Mailman-Users] Mailman 2.1.9 - Fedora 8 - upgrade

[Mark Sapiro]

Brad Knowles wrote:

>on 2/13/09 1:12 PM, Dragos Leahu said:
>
>> 1. Which is the best way to upgrade Mailman to a newer version (the
>> latest if possible) without taking any risk?
>
>All upgrades carry a certain measure of risk.  If you want absolute zero 
>risk, then pull the power cord, toss the machine into an old car, and 
>then take the old car to be crushed and melted down for scrap metal.
>
>Failing that, the least risky upgrade procedure would probably be to get 
>the latest version of the binary package for your platform.  If you want 
>to go that route, you need to talk to the people who prepare those 
>packages -- we provide only source code.


If you do want to upgrade from source, the procedure is complicated by
the fact that RedHat's Mailman packages do not store things in the
same places that the source distribution does and it is not possible
to completely match RedHat's locations solely with configure options
like --prefix and --with-var-prefix. See
<http://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-developers/2004-October/017343.html>
for more on this. There is a patch attached to that post which is
against an older (2.1.5 I think) base which you could probably apply
to 2.1.12 and then configure and make to match your existing
installation.

The alternative is to configure and make normally and then move your
existing installation's files to the new locations. If you run
configure with the options --prefix=/usr/lib/mailman and
--with-var-prefix=/var/lib/mailman, much, but not everything, will be
in the right place.

The potential problem with this approach is that if you use SELinux,
you will probably run into security policy issues.

-- 
Mark Sapiro <mark at msapiro.net>        The highway is for gamblers,
San Francisco Bay Area, California    better use your sense - B. Dylan