So I went to submit a bug report to Debian about the fact that the mailman3-web page drags in nginx for no reason. Turns out that the bug had been reported in 2021 and nobody who worked on it who understood mailman understood apache and nobody who worked on it who understood apache understood mailman[1]. So I submitted an update.
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1002795
[1] Literally, one of the developers said Thanks, I admit initially I had no plan on supporting apache2 as I don't use it. Jonas did that part and therefore I did not follow at all.
Paul Tomblin
I would like to make a note. Firstly, the Debian bug reports *do not* always trickle upstream as they are not necessarily Mailman-upstream bugs or issues. Additionally, the Debian packaging is *NOT* done by Mailman's team necessarily, either, which introduces the "You need to deal with this in $DISTRO specifically, not with us" issue.
But more importantly...
On 2026-03-03 16:08, Paul Tomblin via Mailman-users wrote:
So I went to submit a bug report to Debian about the fact that the mailman3-web page drags in nginx for no reason. Turns out that the bug had been reported in 2021 and nobody who worked on it who understood mailman understood apache and nobody who worked on it who understood apache understood mailman[1]. So I submitted an update.
... if we read the Installation Instructions on the Mailman Suite
documentation [1], we see that the "Recommended for Production"
suggestion is to use the pip / virtualenv installation method.
I would suggest, as such, that any other method including distro-provided packages, should be discouraged in favor of doing it the "pure python and pip" way. Note that it is VERY easy to actually use a Python venv to run the entire Mailman suite, which I do in several production instances.
Thomas
[1]: https://docs.mailman3.org/en/latest/install/install.html
On Tue, Mar 3, 2026, at 4:42 PM, Thomas Ward wrote:
I would like to make a note. Firstly, the Debian bug reports *do not* always trickle upstream as they are not necessarily Mailman-upstream bugs or issues. Additionally, the Debian packaging is *NOT* done by Mailman's team necessarily, either, which introduces the "You need to deal with this in $DISTRO specifically, not with us" issue.
Yeah, i know, it's a packaging error, which is why I reported it to Debian, not to Mailman.
... if we read the Installation Instructions on the Mailman Suite documentation [1], we see that the "Recommended for Production" suggestion is to use the
pip/virtualenvinstallation method.
If you've got a fresh Debian install, and you see Debian packages for Mailman, that's what you're going to try first. Especially after having Mailman 2 installed from Debian packages from Debian 6 to Debian 11. It's only after encountering numerous problems that I uninstalled them and went to look at Mailman's documentation and do it the Mailman way.
It was a lot easier that way - for one thing the documentation is more up to date and complete.
-- Paul Tomblin
participants (2)
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Paul Tomblin -
Thomas Ward