[Pkg-mailman-hackers] Bug#396537: mailman: Bug is bogus? README.Exim4.Debian needs to be updated

[Lionel Elie Mamane]

On Wed, Dec 10, 2008 at 09:00:37PM +0100, Tomas Pospisek wrote:
> On Wed, 10 Dec 2008, Lionel Elie Mamane wrote:
>> On Wed, Dec 10, 2008 at 08:45:31PM +0100, Tomas Pospisek wrote:

>>> IMHO the bug reported in #396537 some 2 years ago doesn't apply any more.
>>> I've followed the instructions in /usr/share/doc/mailman/README.Exim4.Debian
>>> but they are - as far as I can see - bogus as well.

>> The setup you describe does not play well with multiple virtual email
>> domains. It will - as far as Exim is concerned - put every mailing
>> list in every domain, which will lead to errors in mailman (unless you
>> configure mailinglistname at domain as aliases for the list in every list
>> for each virtual domain served by that Exim.

> All right, I stand corrected. However, what is not described in the
> README is what should go into the MAILMAN_HOME/data/aliases File?
> How does it look like? Could you describe that?

It is automatically generated by Mailman; that is the effect of
"MTA='Postfix'" (and putting all mailman email domains in
POSTFIX_STYLE_VIRTUAL_DOMAINS). It contains things like:

 # LOOP ADDRESSES START
 mailman-loop at domain       mailman-loop
 # LOOP ADDRESSES END

for every domain configured in mailman, and

# STANZA START: list.name
# CREATED: Sun May 23 19:00:51 2004
list.name at domain              list.name
list.name-admin at domain        list.name-admin
list.name-bounces at domain      list.name-bounces
list.name-confirm at domain      list.name-confirm
list.name-join at domain         list.name-join
list.name-leave at domain        list.name-leave
list.name-owner at domain        list.name-owner
list.name-request at domain      list.name-request
list.name-subscribe at domain    list.name-subscribe
list.name-unsubscribe at domain  list.name-unsubscribe
# STANZA END: list.name

for every mailing list known to mailman.

Actually, most of this stuff is ignored by Exim4; all it looks for is
a line whose left-hand-side is "foo at bar" when routing the email
addresses foo at bar, foo-subscribe at bar, foo-owner at bar, etc. It ignores
the right-hand-side and it ignores the other additional lines. I had
as a plan to fork off Mailman's Postfix support into a "minimal" Exim
support (that is, recognise MTA='Exim' in mm_cfg.py) that would
generate that file with just:

 list1.name at domain1
 list2.name at domain2
 list3.name at domain3

etc, instead of all the extra unused things, but I never got round to
it; works like that, so never became a priority.

> (I do not understand how the condition line finds out that to which
> domain a list belongs to)

When routing email address foo at bar (or foo-join at bar or foo-owner at bar
or ...), it looks in that file for a line that starts with "foo at bar"
and then whitespace or a ":" or end-of-line.

-- 
Lionel