[Mailman-Users] Will this cause problems for the lists?

[Mark Sapiro]

On 8/23/2012 5:29 AM, Steff Watkins wrote:
> 
> So I had an idea. What if I make a directory, /usr/local/mailman-data
> for instance and then symlink the data, lists and archive directories
> from the current active mailman directories back into this separated
> data directory. I've been running with this setup for a few days now
> and it seems to be working just  fine, no complaints from users or
> systems. I'm also thinking that it is likely to make upgrades require
> less downtime as the new version can be built and linked into the
> current list data and then rolled over. OK, maybe not if there a file
> format conversion needed but in general yes.


I think there may be a better way to to this. When you run configure,
specify --prefix= and --with-var-prefix= to be separate directories, e.g.
--prefix=/usr/local/mailman-2.x.x --with-var-prefix=/usr/local/mailman-data.

This will put the archives, data, lists, locks, logs, qfiles and spam
directories in /usr/local/mailman-data and the Mailman, bin, cgi-bin,
cron, icons, mail, messages, pythonlib, scripts, templates and tests
directories in /usr/local/mailman-2.x.x.

If you do this consistently, you will have only one set of mutable data
in /usr/local/mailman-data and any particular version's immutable code
in its own /usr/local/mailman-2.x.x directory. Then, running
'/usr/local/mailman-2.x.x/bin/mailmanctl start' will start that version
and all versions will use the same data.

There could be issues with file conversions, but the only such things in
the last 10+ releases on the 2.1 branch have been backward compatible
and are likely to remain so.

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