Bugzilla Bug 84708

The INSTALLDIR setting in the beginning of mailman ebuild isn't really
effective as some of the paths are hardcoded in the rest of the ebuild. This
means that for example INSTALLDIR=/opt/mailman causes the local configuration
to be overwriten  and some of the tools from contribute directory are not
installed.

Actually distributions shouldn't use /usr/local. If I remember correctly LSB
reserves that for local admin. Most of the other "odd" packages in gentoo use
/opt instead. Examples: dev-java/blackdown-jdk, www-servers/tomcat

Created an attachment (id=53054) [details]
remove hardcoded paths in favor of INSTALLDIR

I want to get rid of INSTALLDIR and default it to a permanent location, but it
seems that noone agrees on one. Originallly (way before I've touched mailman)
it was in /var then moved to /home, bug #14974. Then after that it've moved to
/usr/local, bug # 21037. Personally I want to rework mailman, have it install
in /var/lib/mailman and the web related files installed by webapp.eclass. I am
short in time and not very good with webapp. Elfyn McBratney and I discuss
about it a bit. Hopefully, he will have something very shortly.

I'm on the net-mail@ alias so I've dropped myself from the Cc, thanks for
adding me though. :)

As Tuan noted, I'm going to hammer something out soon to get the mailman
package in portage webapp'ised.  If the net-mail crew are okay with it, I'll
also get my teeth into migrating mailman away from /usr/local, too - but that's
a big job, so I'd like it if those two tasks were separate. :p

I'll post a link when I have something more complete.

Some applications also needs the mailman binaries to be systemwide accessible
(Savane comes to mind), expecially the "newlist" command to create new lists.

e.g. Savane uses an hardcoded path (probably because it's in use in Debian
systems) like "/usr/sbin/newlist". That makes sense, imho (to have binaries in
/usr/sbin, I mean).

Package systems should not touch /usr/local at all (at least by default). Would
be great to see this re-homed to /var/lib or other location.

*** Bug 97466 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

*** Bug 121064 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

*** Bug 122078 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

*** Bug 96015 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

I see that it would probably be better to make this use webapp-config, but as
long as it doesn't, the attached patch looks sane to me (and I have similar
changes done on my own system).

If nobody crys "no" within the next day, I'll go ahead and apply that changes
to consistently use the INSTALLDIR var.

applied

Any news on this one? I mount /usr read-only so mailman as packaged by Gentoo
is unusable for me.

Ubuntu on the other hand, puts mailman in 
/usr/lib/mailman 
/usr/lib/cgi-bin
/var/lib/mailman
/usr/sbin
...etc...

Attached the output of "dpkg -L mailman" in Ubuntu Edgy

Created an attachment (id=102495) [details]
Ubuntu's mailman...

INSTALLDIR should *not* default to /usr/local, period. Also, there's no way to
configure it without editing the ebuild, as it sets the value unconditionally,
whether INSTALLDIR is defined or not by the user.

We now have installation variables (MAILMAN_INSTALLDIR and MAILMAN_VAR_PREFIX)
that can be used for customized install paths. Beside, we have more sane
defaults (no more /usr/local).

WARNING: Your installation will not work if you update and don't move your
lists around.

Can we have a little documentation about these variables? Besides, the ebuild
2.1.9-r1 has /usr/local hardcoded. Am I missing something?