[Mailman-Users] Linux Preferred?

[Hank van Cleef]

The esteemed Brad Knowles has said:
> 
> on 1/27/09 9:07 AM, Tim Ferguson said:
> 
> > Is there a preferred flavor of Linux that Mailman seems to work and
> > install the best with?  I'm trying Ubuntu, but the apt-get feature is
> > getting hung up on trying to find the repositories and can't, so,
> > until I get that fixed I just thought I'd ask.
> 
> If you're installing from our source, then most any recent version of 
> Linux should work fine.  If you're installing from someone else's binary 
> packages, then you are dependent on the person doing the packaging -- 
> they have to keep up with our releases, back-port patches, etc....
> 
> 
> On python.org, where we host all the official mailman-* mailing lists, 
> Debian works just fine.  But we run the version from our own source, and 
> not the binary packaged version.
> 
I have to put in another "plug" for building Mailman from sources vs.
doing a prepackaged install built by somebody else.   I have just
built and installed Mailman 2.1.11 and 2.1.12rc1 on Solaris 10
following the installation guide at

http://www.gnu.org/software/mailman/mailman-install/index.html

If you've got an appropriate Python installed and have a compiler on
the build machine, actually configuring, building, and installing the
Mailman application is the easiest part of the job.  The remainder are
very straightforward systems administration tasks to get the mailman
account set up properly and get correct permissions on everything.  

We also built Mailman 2.1.9 on a Debian machine a couple of years ago.
Another guy did the work and had problems because he did not follow
the Installation Guide completely.  I was asked to audit and correct
things, which involved no more than correcting group name and
permissions as outlined in the Installation Guide.  

I have always been an advocate for building from source rather than
using prepackaged as the default choice for add-on programs.  Only
when I trust a pre-built package (as with the sendmail and bind in the
Solaris distribution) do I use a prepackaged version.

Hank