Bug 672996 – net-mail/mailman-2.1.29 should support alternatives to www-servers/apache

• Product: Gentoo Linux
• Status: RESOLVED OBSOLETE

[Description Mark 2018-12-12 11:24:02 UTC]

I created a minimal gentoo container for mailman and as I checked what emerge mailman would install, it listed apache. I checked that mailman runs with lighttpd and installed it first - then mailman had no apache dependency anymore and I tried to emerge it.
First, I ran into the 3 year old Bug #568582 (net-mail/mailman--2.1.26: chown: invalid user) but created the user apache with the same uid as lighttpd to mitigate the problem and repeated the installation.
That worked but printed all this apache related stuff:

 * An example Mailman configuration file for Apache has been installed into:
 *   /50_mailman.conf

 * To enable, you will need to add "-D MAILMAN" to
 * /etc/conf.d/apache2.

 * Default-Configuration has changed deeply in 2.1.9-r2. You can configure
 * mailman with the following variables:
 * MAILMAN_PREFIX (default: /usr/lib64/mailman)
 * MAILMAN_VAR_PREFIX (default: /var/lib/mailman)
 * MAILMAN_CGIUID (default: apache)
 * MAILMAN_CGIGID (default: apache)
 * MAILMAN_CGIEXT (default: empty)
 * MAILMAN_MAILUSR (default: mailman)
 * MAILMAN_MAILUID (default: 280)
 * MAILMAN_MAILGRP (default: mailman)
 * MAILMAN_MAILGID (default: 280)

Actually, the defaults should be set to whichever httpd provides the dependency for mailman.
The path /50_mailman.conf is wrong and indicates an empty variable.

Now I removed mailman and my apache user to configure the listed variables (they should be printed _before_ the emerge by the way) only to find out that the mailman user and group was left in the passwd&group file. The package should not let garbage behind after a complete uninstallation.

Ihen I installed again and it suddenly created more output:

 * Config file is now symlinked in /etc/mailman, so etc-update works.
 * 
 * If you're upgrading from below 2.1.9-r2 or changed MAILMAN_PREFIX, you
 * NEED to make a few manual updates to your system:
 * 
 * 1.  Update your mailman users's home directory: usermod -d /usr/lib64/mailman mailman
 * 2.  Re-import the crontab: su - mailman -c 'crontab cron/crontab.in'
 * 3.  Copy your old mm_cfg.py file to /etc/mailman/mm_cfg.py
 * 
 * Additionally if you've modified MAILMAN_VAR_PREFIX (or upgraded from
 * a pre 2.1.9-r2 installation), you should move your old lists/ and
 * archives/ directory to the new location, ensuring that the
 * permissions is correct.  See bug #208789 for a discussion.


So it detected a previously installed version now, which means the package left even more garbage behind.

Please cleanup the ebuild.

[Comment 1 Hanno Böck 2020-11-10 20:46:27 UTC]

Affects obsolete mailman2 package.