[Mailman-Users] Get newer version of Mailman for Debian 6?

[Robert Heller]

At Wed, 14 May 2014 21:40:12 +0200 Sascha Rissel <mailman at rissel.it> wrote:

> 
> Hello there,
> 
> I am running a vServer on Debian6.
> Via "apt-get install mailman" I installed and set up Mailman 2.1.13, which
> is running fine with 5 mailing lists on my server.
> 
> Motivated by all those discussions about Yahoo's DMARC on this list, I
> wondered whether I can upgrade my Mailman installation to a newer version.
> 
> I tried "apt-get update" and "apt-get upgrade" but I did not receive a
> newer version of Mailman.
> 
> Unfortunately I don't consider myself as good enough in Linux usage, to be
> able to build Mailman binaries from scratch on my own. Indeed I tried, but
> already upon executing "configure" (Step 3 in Mailman's installation
> guide<http://list.org/mailman-install/node7.html>)
> I got a python warning
> > Distutils is not available or is incomplete
> which seems to tell me I should install another Python environment.
> 
> So I came to the point when I decided that compiling Mailman on my own is
> too complicated for me, because in the end I definitely want a bug-free
> installation of Mailman.
> 
> Is there maybe an easier way to get a more recent version of Mailman for my
> server?

I don't know how it is for Debian (I use CentOS 5, based on RHEL 5). What *I*
did was get the source RPM for Mailman 2.1.16 for Fedora 21 and using the
source RPM for CentOS 5 (2.1.9) as a guide, modified the Fedora 21 source RPM
to create a Mailman 2.1.16 binary RPM for CentOS 5. My guess is you probably
need to download the source Debian package file(s) for the whatever the
bleeding edge Debian release (Debian testing?) and the corresponding package
for Debian 6 and then compare the two. The 'magic' is all in the
mailman_2.1.<whatever>.debian.tar.tz files. There is actually some fairly good
documentation on how the Debian package building process works -- do a search
on 'how to build Debian package files' (or something like that). Up through
Mailman 2.1.16 or Mailman 2.1.17, there aren't any depenency issues (in terms
of how new a version of system libraries, compilers, or Python) that are
needed to build Mailman, so these fairly 'new' versions of Mailman will build
on an otherwise 'old' distribution (like CentOS 5 or Debian 6), once you have
the build environment up-to-speed -- you will probably need to install some
stock <mumble>-dev packages, etc. Mailman 2.1.18 *might* want a newer version
of Python that is normally found on these systems, which might make things
'interesting'. 

It is also possible someone out there has already build a set of .deb files of 
Mailman 2.1.16 or Mailman 2.1.17 that will install on Debian 6.

> 
> In advance, thanks for your help!
> Sascha.
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>                                 

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Robert Heller             -- 978-544-6933 / heller at deepsoft.com
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