[Pkg-mailman-hackers] Bug#919160: mailman3: stale lock prevents mailman3.service from starting

[Sampo Sorsa]

Package: mailman3
Version: 3.2.0-4~bpo9+1

Dear Maintainer,

Stale lock prevents mailman3.service from starting:

systemd[1]: Starting Mailman3 server...
mailman3[19574]: Usage: mailman start [OPTIONS]
mailman3[19574]: Error: A previous run of GNU Mailman did not exit cleanly (stale_lock).  Try using --force

Currently to fix this, either you:

1) rm /var/lib/mailman3/locks/*
2) sudo -u list mailman -C /etc/mailman3/mailman.cfg start --force
   sudo -u list mailman -C /etc/mailman3/mailman.cfg stop

And then systemctl restart mailman3. Neither of these is very obvious to the user.

>From mailman start --help:

  -f, --force        If the master watcher finds an existing master lock, it
                     will normally exit with an error message.  With this
                     option, the master will perform an extra level of
                     checking.  If a process matching the host/pid described
                     in the lock file is running, the master will still exit,
                     requiring you to manually clean up the lock.  But if no
                     matching process is found, the master will remove the
                     apparently stale lock and make another attempt to claim
                     the master lock.

This looks pretty harmless to add because systemd will be tracking the process anyway.

So I propose to simply add --force to /lib/systemd/system/mailman3.service

--
Sampo Sorsa