Mailman

Installation

You can download mailman from here: http://www.gnu.org/software/mailman/download.html

To verify the download using the signature, add the public keys of the developers listed on the download page, and visit Verifying a File using a Detached Signature at my GnuPG page for the verification process.

Pre-Configure Process

You must first create a group named "mailman" on your system, and create a user named "mailman" in the group "mailman".

# groupadd mailman
# useradd --shell /no/shell --home-dir /no/home --gid mailman mailman

Configuration

For my configuration of mailman, I wanted to make a self-contained installation, including moving the /var/mailman directory (which contains mutable mailman data) into the mailman installation directory. This is the reason for the --with-var-prefix option.

#!/bin/sh

./configure \
    --prefix=${HOME}/pkg/mailman/2.1.14 \
    --with-var-prefix=${HOME}/pkg/mailman/var

Before I ran configure, I had to run

$ mkdir -p ${HOME}/pkg/mailman/var
$ /usr/bin/sudo -u mailman chown mailman ${HOME}/pkg/mailman/var
$ /usr/bin/sudo -u mailman chgrp mailman ${HOME}/pkg/mailman/var
$ /usr/bin/sudo -u mailman chmod 02775 ${HOME}/pkg/mailman/var    # <-- the "02" sets UID and GID permissions

(for more info on setting UID and GID permissions, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setuid)

Once you've created this directory with the correct permissions, do the usual thing:

$ ./runconfigure.sh
$ make -j2
$ /usr/bin/sudo -u mailman make install # <-- must be run as sudo because creating/modifying directories owned by "mailman" user