[Techtalk] Majordomo Replacement?

[Kai MacTane]

First off, a big "thank you!" to everyone who wrote back with tons of 
useful info. The Mailman docs say it is "commonly used with" all four of 
Sendmail, Qmail, Postfix and Exim, so I'll figure that Mailman/Qmail 
integration isn't that much of a chore. So, I'm going to give it a try. It 
*is* pretty standard, and has a Web interface on its own (unlike EZMLM, 
which requires yet another package for that functionality).

At 6/19/03 11:24 PM , Terri Oda wrote:
>On Thu, Jun 19, 2003 at 11:46:41PM +0100, Telsa Gwynne wrote:
> > On Thu, Jun 19, 2003 at 03:00:38PM -0700 or thereabouts, Kai MacTane wrote:
> > > * Must be able to handle multiple domains (see above).
>
>As long as you want to run, say, daisy at domain.com and sunflower at example.com,
>you're golden.  It'll work without any herculean effort on your part -- you
>just tell the list which domain it wants to use.

No problem, then. I did say something about "I don't mind if it's a shared 
name-space for all lists"; this is what I meant. (My phrasing wasn't the best.)

>If you want to host list at domain.com and list at example.com, you have to do
>some tricks to fake it for your users, since the lists have to have unique
>names within Mailman.  For most people, this can be solved by making
>list at domain.com point to, for example, the list domain at domain.com and
>similarly for list at example.com.

Cool! I'm quite willing to have the solution to that simply be, "Nope, you 
can't do it."

>Yup.  It's pretty simple with mbox files.  You take the files and you cat
>them all together in order.  Then move the mbox file to be
>         $MAILMAN_VAR/archives/private/<list>.mbox/<list>.mbox
>and run $MAILMAN_BIN/arch <list>  (you may also want to run the script that
>checks to make sure there aren't any rogue From: lines.  It's called
>"cleanarch")  This will generate the HTML archives.

Oh, groovy.

>If you want the little script to go through and do all that cat'ing for you,
>let me know or check the web.  I found one on the net somewhere and modified
>it to handle archives from the 90's, since the one I got seemed a tad
>confused.

If I have trouble, I may well ask you for your modified one. I know I have 
at least a few archives that also go back before Y2K.

>Mailman *is* being actively developped.  I remember how disenheartened I was
>when I found a bug in majordomo but, at the time, couldn't see anyone
>interested in having a report about it, or receiving the patch I wrote for
>it when I realized no one else was going to solve it.

Yeah, and the license terms won't even let me fork it and take it over. I'd 
be happy to maintain it, and simultaneously build it into a really kick-ass 
modern MLM, but the license doesn't allow for redistribution. (Effectively, 
'domo actually *is not* open-source.) It appears to qualify as an abandoned 
mostly-proprietary project. Ugh.

>Two gotchas:
>1. I've seen some very broken packages of Mailman out and about, so I
>    recommend doing a source install unless you know someone who's
>    using that version of the package.  It's actually probably easier to
>    upgrade from source than from some packages, believe it or not.

No problem, I generally install from source anyway. (Like I said, I'm using 
Slackware... <g> )


                                                 --Kai MacTane
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"Doom. Gloom. Angst. Despair. Tragedy."
                                                 --A. Random Goth