On 1/6/22 3:25 PM, gordon@dickens.com wrote:
How do I uninstall the Debian version and then reinstall with the venv and web instructions so that all of my mailing lists and configuration data are preserved? I may elect to go that route if I can preserve all of my mailing list and data and you think that would be a quicker route to a solution. Is there a simple way to do this?
It's probably not "simple", but here's how I would do it.
First, follow
https://docs.mailman3.org/en/latest/install/virtualenv.html to install
Mailman in a virtualenv. You can use list as the Mailman user rather
than mailman if you like.
The doc uses Postgreql as the database manager, but you want to use whatever the current DBM is because you will want to use the existing database which is where all the list configuration, membership and archives are.
One gotcha here is the instructions tell you to create /etc/mailman3/mailman.cfg and the Debian package already puts its mailman.cfg there. The Debian mailman.cfg may actually be appropriate although it puts things in different places, e.g. /var/lib/mailman3 instead of /opt/mailman/mm/var.
The Debian package puts its Django settings in /etc/mailman3/mailman-web.py and the virtualenv doc puts them in /etc/mailman3/settings.py. You need to reconcile the differences keeping in mind that the recommended settings.py imports most settings from the mailman-web project and only contains things you want to change locally.
The basic idea is you want the virtualenv install to use the existing databases and /var/lib/mailman3 stuff so you preserve all your existing list stuff.
It probably involves several gotchas that might be difficult to resolve if you are less than intimate with the details of a Mailman installation.
I actually spun up a small Ubuntu 20.04 droplet and installed the mailman3-full package to see what things looked like, but I destroyed it without examining the contents of some of the files or I might know more.
-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan