Thanks, Mark!

I am just following the Virtualenv Installation, up to the point when I run

pip install wheel mailman psycopg2-binary\<2.9 from within virtualenv.

This command runs a little time, eventually ending with (the following is printed about 5 or 6 times): ERROR: Command errored out with exit status 1: command: /opt/mailman/venv/bin/python3 -u -c 'import sys, setuptools, tokenize; sys.argv[0] = '"'"'/tmp/pip-install-rdlaw8e1/lazr.delegates/setup.py'"'"'; __file__='"'"'/tmp/pip-install-rdlaw8e1/lazr.delegates/setup.py'"'"';f=getattr(tokenize, '"'"'open'"'"', open)(__file__);code=f.read().replace('"'"'\r\n'"'"', '"'"'\n'"'"');f.close();exec(compile(code, __file__, '"'"'exec'"'"'))' bdist_wheel -d /tmp/pip-wheel-049shc9h cwd: /tmp/pip-install-rdlaw8e1/lazr.delegates/ Complete output (6 lines): usage: setup.py [global_opts] cmd1 [cmd1_opts] [cmd2 [cmd2_opts] ...] or: setup.py --help [cmd1 cmd2 ...] or: setup.py --help-commands or: setup.py cmd --help

error: invalid command 'bdist_wheel'

ERROR: Failed building wheel for lazr.delegates Running setup.py clean for lazr.delegates Failed to build mailman authheaders authres lazr.config dkimpy lazr.delegates Installing collected packages: wheel, atpublic, attrs, aiosmtpd, six, python-dateutil, python-editor, sqlalchemy, MarkupSafe, Mako, alembic, authres, dnspython, dkimpy, publicsuffix2, authheaders, click, falcon, zope.interface, flufl.bounce, flufl.i18n, psutil, flufl.lock, gunicorn, zipp, importlib-resources, nose, lazr.delegates, lazr.config, passlib, urllib3, certifi, idna, charset-normalizer, requests, zope.event, zope.hookable, zope.component, zope.i18nmessageid, zope.schema, zope.configuration, mailman, psycopg2-binary ERROR: Could not install packages due to an EnvironmentError: [Errno 13] Permission denied: '/opt/mailman/venv/lib/python3.8/site-packages/wheel-0.37.1.dist-info' Consider using the --user option or check the permissions.

Did I miss to grant some permissions to the "mailman" user/group?

sascha.rissel@gmail.com writes:

error: invalid command 'bdist_wheel'

I think you need to install the 'wheel' package ('pip install wheel') in your venv. I'm not sure why we don't require it.

If that's not it, let us know!

Steve

For the moment, I ignored this error error: invalid command 'bdist_wheel'

ERROR: Failed building wheel for mailman

and carried on, with creating a configuration file at /etc/mailman3/mailman.cfg for Mailman Core. I notice that directory /etc/mailman3 has not been creating during mailman setup from with venv.

Is this correct? Shall I manually create this directory or persist mailman.cfg at some other location where system user mailman has permissions to?

Hi all,

as Mark suggested, I delete the venv and started anew, making sure that I do

sudo su mailman before creating the venv again.

Executing

pip install wheel mailman psycopg2-binary\<2.9 led to the same error message as in my post https://lists.mailman3.org/archives/list/mailman-users@mailman3.org/message/...

saying

error: invalid command 'bdist_wheel' six times, namely for: ERROR: Failed building wheel for mailman ERROR: Failed building wheel for authheaders ERROR: Failed building wheel for authres ERROR: Failed building wheel for lazr.config ERROR: Failed building wheel for dkimpy ERROR: Failed building wheel for lazr.delegates

pip install wheel

After this, I deleted the venv again and startet anew, again. But this time, I explicitly did (as Stephen suggested above) prior to

pip install wheel mailman psycopg2-binary\<2.9

This time, it ran through without errors, although "wheel" is also contained in the latter command. Can you explain that?

Second question: There is still no directory "/etc/mailman3" created, where I can create mailman.cfg in. Does this maybe result from the fact that in first instance, I tried to install mailman3-full via "apt-get install" and removed it again via "apt-get remove"; with manually deleting /etc/mailman3 afterwards.

Shall I create /etc/mailman3 manually and adding "mailman" system user permissions?

In advance, thanks again for your help!

Odhiambo Washington writes:

Can you possibly blow away everything and start afresh again - using the following howto - https://wiki.list.org/DOC/Howto_Install_Mailman3_On_Debian10 ?

I appreciate your efforts to help, and with a different set of facts your approach *would* be helpful. So don't stop! But please be more careful. Sascha already has successfully installed Mailman (in fact more times than they know :-), has experience with this particular approach to installation, and was already interacting with two core developers. Starting from scratch at this point doesn't make sense.

...

After this, I deleted the venv again and startet anew, again.

Unknown to Sascha, this venv was already a successful install. The error messages can be ignored.

...

...

pip install wheel

But this time, I explicitly did (as Stephen suggested above) prior to

...

pip install wheel mailman psycopg2-binary\<2.9

This time, it ran through without errors, although "wheel" is also contained in the latter command. Can you explain that?

Note: this second run is also successful.

Explanation: "Failed to build wheel" is actually not an error. *wheels* are the preferred packaging format for Python for several years now, but others are available, and pip used one of those instead. I suspect the "Error" tag comes from a separate external command (bdist_wheel), but pip reads the error status and tries an alternative method to build a package.

Sascha: I don't understand why pip doesn't install wheel before starting on mailman in "pip wheel mailman psycopg2-binary\<2.9. I think that's a bug, because this is an obvious way to use pip. Perhaps you have an older version of pip? Have you tried pip install --upgrade pip?

...

Second question: There is still no directory "/etc/mailman3" created, where I can create mailman.cfg in.

That's right. There are a number of different philosophies about handling files like mailman.cfg, and the Mailman install scripts can't be sure which one you want to follow. /etc/mailman3/mailman.cfg probably works for 90% or 95% of installations nowadays, but we don't know. If you're not going to put mailman.cfg there, we shouldn't create the directory.

...

Does this maybe result from the fact that in first instance, I tried to install mailman3-full via "apt-get install" and removed it again via "apt-get remove"; with manually deleting /etc/mailman3 afterwards.

That's what I consider correct behavior as implemented by apt.

...

Shall I create /etc/mailman3 manually and adding "mailman" system user permissions?

Mark wrote earlier, but let me confirm that yes, that's what you should do. Note that Debian and Ubuntu prefer to gather all possible mailing list users into a single user 'list'. I don't think this causes trouble for Mailman, but in many cases if you create a different user (as you will if you follow our instructions), you will have problems if the system-created directory with system-standard owner and permissions is left behind. This is one of several reasons why you should purge (not just delete) packages supplied by distros if you are going to switch to upstream's code. (Obviously keep copies!)

Regards, Steve

Sascha Rissel writes:

I wonder a bit how deep I have to dive into these individual configuration files. Is there some minimal config for a standard Ubuntu/Debian system?

I think that if you follow the "venv" process as described in https://docs.mailman3.org/en/latest/install/virtualenv.html?, it covers everything you must configure. There are about a dozen places that you must check in mailman.cfg, such as the location of your MTA and its port (for the simplest installations, host=127.0.0.1, port=25 will do), mailman's LMTP port (usually the default of 8024 will do), and the credentials for accessing the REST interface (restadmin and restpass: change these!!) Pretty sure there are others. There are quite a few decisions that need to be made in mailman-web settings.py, including setting the REST credentials to the ones you chose in mailman.cfg, and setting up your database (sqlite3 is great for quick experiments or tiny installations with 10 posts/year ;-). And I don't think there are any MTAs or webservers that are plug and play with Mailman: you have to configure the MTA to forward mailman list addresses to Mailman's LMTP port, and usually there's nontrivial configuration of the namespaces that are to be forwarded to Mailman/Django and those that are served directly (such as CSS style files) by the webserver. Django also has its own access credentials that must be coordinated with mailman.cfg I think.

So "minimal" is still pretty complex.

While I would be *extremely* cautious about using any *values* for parameters that are specified in Brian Carpenter's HOWTO https://wiki.list.org/DOC/Howto_Install_Mailman3_On_Debian10 (this is the one that Odhiambo suggested, and it's a really valuable resource), I'm pretty sure it accurately covers all the steps you need to take in configuration. You may find it easier to read than our manual. Going through that and checking your venv configuration against the steps in the HOWTO would be a good way to confirm that you've got a good configuration.