Mailman - The GNU Mailing List Management System Copyright (C) 1998-2018 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 2.1.5+ to 2.1.18+ Mailman 2.1.18 introduced a new Python dependency to support the dmarc_moderation_action feature. This requires that the dnspython package be available in the configured Python. ./configure will quit with an error message if it doesn't find dnspython. The package can be downloaded from or from the CheeseShop or installed with pip. 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/ directory. It then copies all the .txt and .html files from lists/ into lists//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//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/ is moved to $prefix/archives/private/.mbox/ 2) if a list has only a public mbox archive $prefix/archives/public/ is moved to $prefix/archives/private/.mbox/ and a symlink is made that points $prefix/archives/public/.mbox to $prefix/archives/private/.mbox/ 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/ and a symlink is made from $prefix/archives/public/ 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 . 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//* is moved to $prefix/lists/. 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 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/ - Some modules that existed in previous versions, but that have been replaced with newer (differently named) modules, are removed. Local Variables: mode: indented-text indent-tabs-mode: nil End: