[Mailman-Users] packages vs sources

[Mark Sapiro]

On 04/21/2015 12:18 PM, Danil Smirnov wrote:
> 2015-04-21 21:23 GMT+03:00 Mark Sapiro <mark at msapiro.net>:
>> But this raises the question, if you are installing Mailman from source,
>> why do you still have artifacts from the distro's package still in your
>> installation.
> 
> Why you name them 'artefacts'? I consider them very convenient technology
> working great for Mailman 2.1.18-1 also. I can stop and start Mailman service
> with 'service' tool and I don't need to worry about crontab entries.


They are things that are in some sense left over from a prior install of
a distro's Mailman package. Had you just installed Mailman from source
without ever installing the package, you would not be aware of them.
Thus, they are artifacts left over from the package.


> Give me a reason why I wouldn't do this.


If you know exactly what you are doing and how things that remain from
the package interact with your source install/upgrade, that's fine, and
if you like those specific things you continue to use, there's no reason
not to.

But those conditions don't apply to everyone and people sometimes get
themselves in trouble when they knowingly or unknowingly mix things from
a package with things from the source distribution that may not be
compatible in the ways that they do things.

For example, your packages /etc/init.d/mailman script copies
(apparently) /opt/local/share/mailman/cron/crontab.in or maybe
/(var|usr)/lib/mailman/cron/crontab.in to /etc/cron.d/mailman.

If in the process of installing/upgrading your installation from the
source distribution you had copied the source cron/crontab.in to
whatever crontab.in the /etc/init.d/mailman script copies from, it would
not work because the source cron/crontab.in is a 'user' crontab and
doesn't have 'mailman' as the 6th field in the entries.

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