Arch Linux

On my system, which runs mailman-2.1.8-2 together with postfix-2.2.11-1,
the upgrade from mailman-2.1.8-1 to -2 resulted in 'group mismatch'
errors when trying to post to mailing lists:

The Postfix program

<xxx@yyy>: Command died with status 2:
"/home/mailman/mail/mailman post xxx". Command output: Group
mismatch error. Mailman expected the mail wrapper script to be executed as
group "exim", but the system's mail server executed the mail script as
group "mailman". Try tweaking the mail server to run the script as group
"exim", or re-run configure, providing the command line option
`--with-mail-gid=mailman'.


I wonder why this ever worked, maybe you have an explanation:

* The Arch Linux mailman PKGBUILD[1] creates a group 'mailman' with
gid 80:
groupadd -g 80 mailman
* On any $CARCH not equal to x86_64, the configure script is being run
with a mail gid of 79...
else ./configure --with-mail-gid=79 --prefix=/home/mailman

In the 2.1.8-1 release, everything worked fine, supposedly because on
the system you built the package on there was no gid 79, and the
configure script defaulted to the 'mailman' group which existed (because
you force its existence in the beginning of the script).

In the 2.1.8-2 release, the /home/mailman/mail/mailman binary suddenly
started to check for the 'exim' group instead for 'mailman'; maybe after
the 2.1.8-1 build there was introduced a group 'exim' with gid 79 on that
machine? This is just an educated guess, but it would explain the
observed behaviour.

Is there a reason for this "#fix for Arch64" in PKGBUILD anyways? Why
don't you just run ./configure --with-mail-gid=mailman? And TBH, I don't
really see what the "rebuilt mailman -- was having perm issues" PKGBUILD
diff was meant to "fix" actually ("sleep 2" between groupadd and
useradd...?).

Building /home/mailman/mail/mailman manually with
--with-mail-gid=mailman resolved the problem for me.

Kind regards,
Horst Schirmeier

p.s.: Horst and I are co-admins of the system. Critical severity for me because it breaks mailman and everyone user of existing mailing lists will get postfix bounces