On 12/29/2016 11:51 AM, Carl Zwanzig wrote: > [changed the subject] > Hi, > > I realize this wasn't part of your question, but- > > On 12/29/2016 8:16 AM, Jay Sekora wrote: >> The old server is running Debian and Mailman 2.1.13 (from the Debian >> package). The new server is running Ubuntu and Mailman 2.1.16 (from the >> Ubuntu Trusty package; we need to run Trusty for now for complex and >> uninteresting reasons; I'd rather run 2.1.18, and may look into running >> that on Trusty once I get the basic migration issues resolved). > > Install 2.1.23 from source? I seems like most linux packages are older > versions (and the list archive has many questions about them). I assume > there are reasons, but I'm not that deep into linux to know what they are.
Sure, that's a good way to go if freshness is more important than consistent packaging. The advantage of sticking with distro packages is that (1) somebody else is on top of the security updates (and with Debian in particular, a lot of attention is often devoted to automating upgrade-related maintenance) and (2) there's coordination with other packages on the system (so for instance if a security upgrade to Python requires a minor tweak to Mailman I'll get both at the same time), and log-rotation and cron jobs and the like are handled in a consistent way across packages, and you can expect the Debian/Ubuntu Mailman package to work smoothly with the Debian/Ubuntu SpamAssassin and Exim packages, for instance. In this particular case, I have seen reports that the Xenial (16.04) Mailman packages install and run cleanly on Trusty (14.04), and another approach would be to rebuild the package with newer source, but of course those impact the above advantages to some degree (as does just installing from upstream source). Jay PS -- One other advantage to installing from distro packages, especially on a widely deployed platform like Ubuntu, Fedora, or RHEL, is that a large fraction of the other people out on the web are doing the same thing, so if you run into something peculiar, some other package-using newbie on the net may have posted about the exact same problem. Obviously on a Mailman-specific list like this (or a Drupal-specific list or a ClamAV-specific list, or whatever) the ratio of people installing from source is likely to be higher, though, and of course that's where to look for the highest-quality answers. -- Jay Sekora Linux system administrator and postmaster, The Infrastructure Group MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory ------------------------------------------------------ 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
