On Tue, Mar 2, 2021, at 9:12 AM, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
Lars Schimmer writes:
On 27/02/2021 04:02, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
It's not necessary to "keep up" to be very helpful to our users, of course. But I think Brian's document is likely to be the "gold standard" for a while. I understand why Abhilash wants it in the official docs. :-)
If it should be a gold standard, it should mention the default setup of a standard debian system (which is exim4, btw) and not assuming a special setup debian system.
"Gold standard" means it does what it sets out to *really* *well*. "Gold standard" does not mean it does everything everybody wants. In particular, much of the appeal of Brian's guide is that it's how he sets up a Mailman 3 host, and he's proved it's repeatable, many times. Anything that he doesn't use himself doesn't belong in his guide.
We already have a descriptions of Exim (which I wrote the original) and Apache setups in the "official" docs. There's no good reason to treat Debian specially, since we don't distribute .debs ourselves. It's not even clear that we should recommend apt-get mailman! And surely no need, as that is the obvious (but not necessarily best for any given server!) way to set up a Debian Mailman installation. But there is good reason to believe that typical Debian installations will be quite out of date, because most admins prefer to run a server based on stable or LTS distros, not bleeding edge (Debian "sid") or even beta (Debian "testing") distributions, while updates to Mailman continue to be frequent and important to many or even most users.
Also, FWIW, we do point users to Debian packages in the docs1 and don't mind pointing users to other distro packages either.
One thing I do want to clear out is that in my emails when I say "official install guide", my focus is primarily on installation using "pip". There are some distro level packages that even "pip" cannot install where we have to get specific and say, install this package when on debian/ubuntu and such. Like Steve mentioned earlier, Debian is just a part of the setup process because we rely on some packages like Postfix, Nginx, GCC etc.
It is _relatively_ easy to update/maintain the "pip" installation guide for more distros where we provide instructions specific to Mailman and ask users to install the system packages that Mailman needs. My mantra with this2 specific install guide is to be thorough enough for someone to setup latest Mailman 3, but doesn't care about which Linux distro they use, using pip on a Debian system (because that's what many of the developers use) but have enough pointers for someone using a different distro.
The "default" choices are simply based on what we run and can provide some level of support for on this list.
-- thanks, Abhilash Raj (maxking)