Mailman and Gentoo

Not my usual wibbling - this might actually be useful to someone for a change! If you are using gentoo on your server and you upgrade mailman across 2.1.9-r2 it will break. Badly.

This is because they've moved the set up out of /usr/local/mailman and split it between /usr/lib/mailman and /var/lib/mailman. To get it working again you will need to do the following, all as root I would suggest:

1. Stop mailman and postfix.
2. Copy the contents of the following directories from /usr/local/mailman into the corresponding directories in /var/lib/mailman (use 'cp -a' to preserve the permissions): archives, lists, data, logs, and qfiles. You might want to add qfiles and spam.
3. Fix the symlinks in /var/lib/mailman/archives/public. I did it like this:

   ~
   # cd /var/lib/mailman/archives/public
   /var/lib/mailman/archives/public
   #  for FILE in * ; do rm $FILE
   > ln -s /var/lib/mailman/archives/private/$FILE .
   > done
   /var/lib/mailman/archives/public
   #
   

   but feel free to use the bash rune of your choice.

4. Manually edit /var/lib/mailman/data/aliases replacing all references to /usr/local with /usr/lib then run postmap on it to re-build alias.db
5. Edit /etc/postfix/main.cf which will have a line defining alias_maps which will include hash:/usr/local/mailman/data/aliases - you need to change that to hash:/var/lib/mailman/data/aliases
6. Take a look at /etc/apache2/modules.d/50_mailman.conf which you may need to fix in the same way, replacing /usr/local with /usr/lib
7. Run 'usermod -d /usr/lib/mailman mailman' to change mailman's home directory.
8. Cross your fingers. Restart mailman and postfix.