Mark Sapiro writes: > On 05/03/2015 06:17 AM, Laura Creighton wrote: > > On all the machines I can ssh to, I have an > > /etc/mailman/mm_cfg.py as well as a /usr/lib (or /var/lib) > > /mailman/Mailman/mm_cfg.py, and the second is a symbolic link to > > the first. Why do we have an /etc/mailmand/mm_cfg.py at all? > > In a word (or acronym), FHS. > <http://www.pathname.com/fhs/> > > Actually, AFAIK, the Red Hat (hence CentOS) Mailman package is the only > one that does it right.
I don't understand what you mean by "right". John Dennis's distinction that mm_cfg.py is "executable" and others aren't is bogus AFAICS; there are lots of apparently data-only files that are actually interpreted code (PDF being one of the more powerful and dangerous). What matters here is exceptional treatment of this one file by the PMS. In the case of Red Hat, they cannot simply unpack the archive into place (in practice, noboby does that any more, but that's a different issue); they have to either avoid copying over mm_cfg.py or preserve it and restore it. In Debian, you can just unpack the archive, but then you need to remove the distributed mm_cfg.py and restore the symlink. AFAICS these procedures are basically equivalent, except that both the PMS and the sysadmin have to know something special about Mailman in the Red Hat scheme. Note that in the Debian scheme you can be an old Mailman hand and edit /var/lib/mailman/Mailman/mm_cfg.py, or Debian admins who don't know much about the history of Mailman can just go to the FHS place in /etc/mailman and find mm_cfg.py there. That's an advantage to the Debian scheme AFAICS. Another (minor) advantage is that in the Debian scheme the PMS doesn't have to do anything special to protect the "real" mm_cfg.py, it just never automatically edits anything under /etc. ------------------------------------------------------ Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: https://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org
