Mailman - The GNU Mailing List Management System
Copyright (C) 1998-2014 by the Free Software Foundation, Inc.
51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA
UPGRADING FROM PREVIOUS VERSIONS
For the most part, upgrading Mailman entails installing the latest version
over the existing version. Usually, you can unpack the new release, run
'configure' with the same options you used in your previous install, and
then do a 'make install'. However, there are some changes that may need
to be taken care of manually.
What you need to do depends on the version you are using and the version
you are upgrading to. In all cases, you should first turn off your mail
and web access to your Mailman installation. You're essentially upgrading
a database, and it's usually a good idea to make sure the database cannot
be modified in the middle of the upgrade.
My recommendations are:
- Turn off your incoming mail daemon. Most remote smtp servers will
simply queue up messages destined for your domain if port 25 is shut
off.
- Temporarily disable web access to Mailman. You can do this by either
turning off your web server temporarily, or by setting up a temporary
redirect to a "service unavailable" page for the Mailman URLs. Refer to
your web server documentation for details.
UPGRADING PYTHON
If you are replacing Python with a newer version in the same location,
you don't need to do anything special for Mailman.
If you are installing a Python upgrade to be used by Mailman along side
an existing Python, you will need to configure Mailman with the
--with-python option to point to your new Python and you will need to
check Mailman's crontab and any /etc/init.d/ script and manually fix any
python commands as needed.
UPGRADING FROM 2.1.4 to 2.1.5
In Mailman 2.1.5, some significant changes have been made to the file
formats for qfiles and the pendings database. All care has been taken to
make sure the upgrades happen automatically and smoothly, but you should
double check and, for the ultra-paranoid, make backups of your Mailman
site before you upgrade. BE SURE TO TURN OFF MAILMAN AS DESCRIBED ABOVE
BEFORE YOU UPGRADE.
Specifically, in MM2.1.4 every message in the queues was represented by
two files, a .msg or .pck file containing the email message, and a .db
file containing metadata about the message. In MM2.1.5 this has been made
more efficient by using only one file (with a .pck extension) for both the
message and metadata. This should make MM2.1.5 half as hostile to the
file system.
The bin/update script, which is run automatically when you upgrade,
should convert all the old style qfiles to the new style qfiles. Note
that this could take a long time if you have a lot of files in your qfiles
subdirectories. Pay particular attention to files you might have in
qfiles/shunt; these will get upgraded too, although files in qfiles/bad
will not.
In MM2.1.4, the database file containing pending actions (i.e
subscriptions, unsubscriptions, message holds, etc.) was shared globally
among all mailing lists. In MM2.1.5, each list now has its own pending
database file. All care has been taken to properly split pending actions
from the global to the list-specific files, but it's possible there are
bugs here. Best practice is to clear all pending actions before you
upgrade, although this is not always possible.
UPGRADING FROM 2.0.x to 2.1
When you upgrade from Mailman 2.0.x to Mailman 2.1, you should double
check that your moderation and privacy options are still set the way you
want them. The Mailman options dealing with moderation and privacy have
changed significantly, to make them easier to understand and control.
Ever effort was taken to translate the old configuration variables to the
new configuration variables, but because the old semantics were so
complex, it is possible your settings may not have been correctly
translated.
Check especially the values for (in Privacy -> Sender Filters)
default_member_moderation, generic_nonmember_action, and
accept_these_nonmembers. Also check the moderation flag on member
accounts in the Membership Management screen.
In Mailman 2.1, the qrunner subsystem has been completely
rewritten. You no longer start qrunner from cron! Instead, there
is a bin/mailmanctl script which is used to start, stop, and
restart mail delivery. This script is appropriate to use as a
Unix init script. Be sure to update your crontab with the new
cron/crontab.in file.
NOTE: It is very important that if you are upgrading from a
pre-MM2.1alpha2 system to a post-MM2.1alpha2 system that you let
the old qrunner process clear any and all messages sitting in the
qfiles/ directory *BEFORE* you upgrade. Otherwise after the
upgrade, those messages will not get delivered, and there is no
easy way to upgrade those pending messages.
NOTE: When upgrading to Mailman 2.1, you will need to regenerate
your aliases files. There have been many changes to the alias
names, the programs they map to, and the name of the wrapper
script. See the Mailman Installation Manual for details of making
Mailman work with your mail server.
To regenerate your aliases, use the bin/genaliases script.
IMPORTANT: The encryption algorithm for list admin passwords has
changed which means that after upgrading from 2.0.x to 2.1.x, list
passwords will have to be reset. There is a new bin/change_pw tool
to help with this.
Mailman 2.1 introduces multilingual (a.k.a. internationalization
or i18n) support. Previously only one language per list was
supported, and it was assumed that this language would be English.
The upgrade script for Mailman 2.1 creates a subdirectory `en'
inside each lists/<listname> directory. It then copies all the
.txt and .html files from lists/<listname> into
lists/<listname>/en.
If you have modified those templates to contain non-English text,
you will have to manually rename the en subdirectories to the
language code for the language of your templates. Mailman's
upgrade script should handle cleaning up any templates which are
duplicates of the defaults, but you'll want to double check this
manually.
If you are running a MM2.0.x system with non-standard patches
applied, you might have some other problems with your upgrade.
Here are some instances we know about:
- If you've applied patch #413752 (coerce to plaintext), then your
upgrade will not go smoothly. Take a look at patch #651406 for
an unofficial solution.
http://sf.net/tracker/?group_id=103&atid=300103&func=detail&aid=413752
http://sf.net/tracker/?group_id=103&atid=300103&func=detail&aid=651406
UPGRADING INDIVIDUAL LISTS
If you're nervous about upgrading all of your lists to 2.1 in one
go, you can move them and upgrade them one at a time. Start by
doing a clean Mailman 2.1 installation in an empty directory --
call it $MM21. (I'll assume your Mailman 2.0 installation is in
$MM20.)
Doing this means you'll have co-habiting Mailman 2.0 and 2.1
installations for a while, until you have moved all of your lists
to Mailman 2.1. Depending on your MTA and web server, this could
be transparent and painless, or it could be an ongoing headache.
If you use Apache with mod_rewrite, then it's fairly
straightforward to set things up so that both Mailman 2.0 and 2.1
inhabit the /mailman and /pipermail URL-space of your server; this
makes the transition almost transparent to list admins and
subscribers. See below for details.
Now, for each list that you want to move, you'll have to
* Shut down your MTA.
If you have a lot of outgoing list traffic, you might need to
leave your MTA up but only let it accept connections from
127.0.0.1 (localhost), so Mailman 2.0 can flush its queue.
How to do this is MTA-dependent; for Exim, you can set
"local_interfaces = 127.0.0.1" and "kill -HUP" the Exim
daemon.
* Shut down your web server. For a more professional look, or
if you want to allow people to keep accessing the rest of your
web site, you could make your web server respond to all
/mailman/ URLs with a "temporarily unavailable" message.
How to do this is web server-dependent; with Apache and
mod_rewrite, this does the trick:
RewriteRule ^/mailman/.* /var/www/unavailable.html [L]
(Of course, you'll have to supply your own
/var/www/unavailable.html.)
* Force Mailman 2.0 to process its queue:
python -S $MM20/cron/qrunner
(This is only necessary if there are any files in $MM20/qfiles;
if you need to do this, make sure you left your MTA listening to
127.0.0.1.)
* Move the list:
cd $MM20
mv -i lists/foo-list $MM21/lists
mv -i archives/private/foo-list $MM21/archives/private
mv -i archives/private/foo-list.mbox $MM21/archives/private
rm archives/public/foo-list
rm archives/public/foo-list.mbox
cd $MM21
bin/withlist -l -r fix_url mylist
(The fix_url step will not be necessary if your Mailman 2.0
and 2.1 installations will be sharing the same URL-space.)
* Edit your web server config so the list's URLs continue to
work. There are two possible approaches here; the simpler way
is to setup a new slice of URL-space that will be used by your
Mailman 2.1 installation, eg. /mailman-21:
With Apache and mod_rewrite:
RewriteRule /mailman/(.*)/(foo-list.*) /mailman-21/$1/$2 [R=temp]
(The [R=temp] assumes that "/mailman-21/" is a temporary URL,
and you'll move all your lists to "/mailman/" when the
transition to Mailman 2.1 is complete.)
If you don't want to expose ugly temporary URLs like
"/mailman-21" to the world, it's only slightly more work to make
Mailman 2.0 and 2.1 share the same slices of URL-space. Here's
how to do it with Apache and mod_rewrite:
RewriteRule ^/mailman/(.*)/(foo-list.*) \
$MM21/cgi-bin/$1/$2 \
[T=application/x-httpd-cgi]
Not only is this more aesthetically pleasing, it's faster -- no
redirects.
In either case, you'll want to rewrite the list's archive URLs
to Mailman 2.1's archive:
RewriteRule ^/pipermail/(foo-list.*) $MM21/archives/public/$1
* Restart your web server (or disable the "temporarily
unavailable" stuff).
* Restart your MTA (or make it listen to more than just
127.0.0.1).
UPGRADING FROM 2.0 to 2.0.x (where x >= 1)
Nothing much more than running "make install" (after upgrading)
should be necessary.
UPGRADING FROM 2.0 beta to 2.0 final
You MUST re-run configure; running config.status is not sufficient
due to some recent changes in the autoconf scripts. You can do a
head of config.status if you don't remember the options you
originally ran configure with.
The cron jobs for Mailman 2.0 final have changed considerably,
including the frequency with which they run. You should reload
misc/crontab.in for the `mailman' user to get the right settings.
See the INSTALL file for details.
FAILURE TO DO THIS WILL RESULT IN A LESS THAN OPTIMALLY FUNCTIONAL
MAILMAN INSTALLATION.
UPGRADING FROM 1.x to 2.x
In addition to the instructions above, I highly recommend that you
make sure your Mailman queue is cleared /before/ upgrading.
Mailman version 1.x had a cron script called run_queue which was
part of its bulk mailer. With Mailman 2.x there is no default
bulk mailer (it lets the MTA handle this), and it is currently
unknown what the effects of upgrading are on the run_queue script,
but I'll bet it's not good. :)
The way to make sure that your Mailman queue is empty is to look
in your $prefix/data directory. If you see any files that start
with "mm_q." you've still got messages waiting on the queue. You
can run $prefix/cron/run_queue by hand until the queue is cleared.
Multiple invocations of this script won't help though; they lock
each other out. Also, be warned that clearing the queue can take
a while and may cause a large load on your system (two reasons why
all this stuff has been redesigned in 2.x :).
You do not need to run "make update" if you are upgrading from
version 1.0 or 1.1 to version 2.0, since this is now run
automatically when you do a "make install". However you should
modify your crontab entries to execute cron/qrunner instead of
cron/run_queue. You can also safely remove the file
$prefix/cron/run_queue.
If you are upgrading from a pre-1.0 beta, you need to follow the
instructions below.
UPGRADING FROM PRE-1.0 to 2.x
You need to do a few extra things to make sure that the file
system layout for the early 1.0 betas is upgraded to the 1.x
configuration. There are two ways to do this.
First, from the source directory, after you've done a "make
install" you can run "make update". "make update" creates a file
named "update.log" in the top level of the source distribution.
If the script that updates the Mailman filesystem encounters
something that is not resolvable, it will log info about this to
"update.log". This is worth checking after the upgrade completes.
You can also just change to the installation directory (i.e. $prefix)
and run bin/update. This is the same as above except that the
update.log file is not generated.
Check your crontab entry. Remove any runs of obsolete scripts, in
particular cron/upvolumes_yearly, cron/upvolumes_monthly, or
cron/archive.
WHAT "MAKE UPDATE" DOES
Below is an annotated listing of the things that "make update"
does. Hopefully, this will help resolve any problems you are
having.
Note that it can't hurt to run "make update" each time you
upgrade, but if you're running version 1.0 or newer, it won't help
much either!
- To upgrade to 1.0b10, you will need to copy
templates/options.html to lists/<listname>/options.html for each
mailing list you have. However, if you have edited the
options.html file, say from the Web interface, you will have to
merge these changes in manually.
- The upgrade to 1.0b7 included the removal of
Mailman/smtplib.py{,c} since Mailman now uses the default Python
1.5.2 version of smtplib.
- Archiving files are moved around as part of integrating
Pipermail into Mailman, as of 1.0b6. In particular,
1) if a list has only a private mbox archive
$prefix/archives/private/<listname> is moved to
$prefix/archives/private/<listname>.mbox/<listname>
2) if a list has only a public mbox archive
$prefix/archives/public/<listname> is moved to
$prefix/archives/private/<listname>.mbox/<listname>
and a symlink is made that points
$prefix/archives/public/<listname>.mbox to
$prefix/archives/private/<listname>.mbox/<listname>
3) if a list has both private and public mbox archives,
make update picks one of the above 2 configurations based on
whether or not the list currently is archived publicly. It then
renames the other mbox to mbox.preb6.
4) if a list used recent CVS sources, where archives were placed in
$prefix/public_html/archives, then these are moved to
$prefix/archives/private/<listname> and a symlink is made from
$prefix/archives/public/<listname> to that spot if the list's
archives are public. Also, a permissions-related security
problem is removed.
To integrate mbox archives of old lists, log in as user `mailman'
and run $prefix/bin/arch <listname> <path-to-mbox-archive>.
Also, by default, beta6 does both mbox and html based archiving,
but you can configure Mailman to do one, both, or neither.
Please see $prefix/Mailman/Defaults.py for details.
There was a short period of time when the CVS sources archiving
code was not organized into its own package. The pickled
articles in the archives that were placed into archives during
this period stored the path to the module HyperArch, but that
module has moved. You can quick fix this by running
ln -s $prefix/Mailman/Archiver/HyperArch.py \
$prefix/Mailman/HyperArch.py
- If upgrading from version 1.0b4 or earlier, "make update" moves
list-specific templates. For each list,
$prefix/templates/<listname>/* is moved to $prefix/lists/<listname>.
Please reference the generic templates in $prefix/templates to see
if any variables have changed (There shouldn't be many, only
options.html was updated from b5 to b6).
For really old versions of Mailman, you may not even have
<listname> subdirectories in $prefix/templates! In this case
you will need to manually copy some files into your new list
directories. Here's an example shell command that will do the
trick:
cp templates/{archives,handle_opts,listinfo,roster,subscribe}.html lists/<listname>
- Some modules that existed in previous versions, but that have
been replaced with newer (differently named) modules, are
removed.
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