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 attachment 53054 [details, diff] 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 attachment 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?
