The mailing list for listmasters using Sympa

["Nicolas Brouard" <address@concealed>]

Hi,

I just updated my linux version of our mailing-list server which runs
"sympa". I have been surprised by the facility of implementing linux using
the Mandrake distribution! I hope that it is the same for the other
distributions.

Mandrake is really 'up to date' for many softwares (KDE2), perl, mhonarc
etc., but not for sympa which is still stuck on version 2.2 (the actual CVS
version is 3.3b7!). So, I have been able to reinstall from scratch all the
linux tools that I need, Apache, Gnu-Emacs, PdfLaTeX, g77 in 30 minutes but
since then I have spent more than 3 days to install a more recent version of
sympa.

I have tried to understand why the sympa version distributed by Mandrake
does not evolve.

The team of sympa developpers put a more recent (3.3b4) rpm for redhat and
even for mandrake but you can't use it (cypher Perl is required but if you
install it from CPAN, some data base is not updated and rpm don't want to
install latest sympa-mdk.rpm). The only solution is to download the SRPMS
and try to understand how the SPECS and even the Makefile.am and
configure.in are done by the sympa team and differ from the Mandrake team.

To be brief the Sympa team wants to put everything in /home/sympa (bin, etc)
and the Mandrake team have specific directories /var/sympa, /var/lib/sympa,
/usr/lib/sympa/run, /etc/sympa/sympa.conf /etc/sympa/wwsympa.conf ; even
wwsympa.fcgi has to be put with other cgi-bin in
/var/www/cgi-bin/wwsympa.fcgi.

It seems to me that the Mandrake logic is much more general and is mandatory
for someone who wants to update not only a few softwares but hundred of
softwares with each new linux release.

To adapt the sympa-mdk.rpm to Mandrake standard we need a newer
parametrization of the different sympa Makefiles (there is no "make
Makefile" in sympa) but I think that it is necessary to do it. Otherwise it
will be too much work for the Mandrake team to it themselves at each
release. And as I presume they will never accept the Sympa team directory
logic which is less general, the distribution of sympa will suffer as it is
already suffering now.

Does nyone know how is the Red Hat's situation or even Suze's. Do sympa
users use rpms or tar.gz files?

What are the arguments of the Sympa team to not generalize and spread the
different directories of a running sympa distribution?

Mandrake is really impressive, Sympa too. So, why this problem? And this
huge amount of time lost for anybody who wants to install a recent version
of sympa (at least with encrypted passwords!).

Nicolas Brouard
address@concealed