[Mailman-Users] Will this cause problems for the lists?
Hi all, Just been reading the wonderful emails and pages about upgrading Mailman, which is a task I've had to do once before. Now one thing that really gives me the shivers is the idea of installing the new updated version of Mailman right over the old/current version as I've seen suggested a couple of time. OK, if it works for you fine but I feel that that leaves you very little room for rollback should the new version not perform quite as expected. So I currently have a nice working setup that's installed as /usr/local/mailman-2.x.x symlink'ed to /usr/local/mailman and that works just fine. It allows me to have the current version and the previous version there for comparison/rollback/experimenting. Now one thing I have noticed that has bothered me/caused me some problems with this sort of setup is that everytime I have to upgrade I have to copy all the mail-list data out, then make sure that ownerships/permissions of the mail-list data in its new location is correct. So I had an idea. What if I make a directory, /usr/local/mailman-data for instance and then symlink the data, lists and archive directories from the current active mailman directories back into this separated data directory. I've been running with this setup for a few days now and it seems to be working just fine, no complaints from users or systems. I'm also thinking that it is likely to make upgrades require less downtime as the new version can be built and linked into the current list data and then rolled over. OK, maybe not if there a file format conversion needed but in general yes. However, I'm just wondering if I may be building up a problem for myself when one of the less frequent Mailman processes or events occur. So is separating the data out from the mailman binaries in this way a good idea or not worth the effort? Regards, Steff Watkins - Steff Watkins Natural History Museum, Cromwell Road, London,SW75BD Systems programmer Email: s.watk...@nhm.ac.uk Systems Team Phone: +44 (0)20 7942 6000 opt 2 Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans. - HHGTTG -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://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: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org
Re: [Mailman-Users] Will this cause problems for the lists?
On 8/23/2012 5:29 AM, Steff Watkins wrote: So I had an idea. What if I make a directory, /usr/local/mailman-data for instance and then symlink the data, lists and archive directories from the current active mailman directories back into this separated data directory. I've been running with this setup for a few days now and it seems to be working just fine, no complaints from users or systems. I'm also thinking that it is likely to make upgrades require less downtime as the new version can be built and linked into the current list data and then rolled over. OK, maybe not if there a file format conversion needed but in general yes. I think there may be a better way to to this. When you run configure, specify --prefix= and --with-var-prefix= to be separate directories, e.g. --prefix=/usr/local/mailman-2.x.x --with-var-prefix=/usr/local/mailman-data. This will put the archives, data, lists, locks, logs, qfiles and spam directories in /usr/local/mailman-data and the Mailman, bin, cgi-bin, cron, icons, mail, messages, pythonlib, scripts, templates and tests directories in /usr/local/mailman-2.x.x. If you do this consistently, you will have only one set of mutable data in /usr/local/mailman-data and any particular version's immutable code in its own /usr/local/mailman-2.x.x directory. Then, running '/usr/local/mailman-2.x.x/bin/mailmanctl start' will start that version and all versions will use the same data. There could be issues with file conversions, but the only such things in the last 10+ releases on the 2.1 branch have been backward compatible and are likely to remain so. -- Mark Sapiro m...@msapiro.netThe highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, Californiabetter use your sense - B. Dylan -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://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: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org