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List:       mailman-users
Subject:    [Mailman-Users] What does rmlist remove?
From:       "Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull.stephen.fw () u ! tsukuba ! ac ! jp>
Date:       2021-03-23 16:42:25
Message-ID: 24666.6769.2249.31936 () turnbull ! sk ! tsukuba ! ac ! jp
[Download RAW message or body]

Carl's message arrived just as I was about to post this, looks
accurate.  If you want more detail, here it is.

Johannes Rohr writes:

 > what files are being removed by rmlist (without -a). I suppose,
 > /var/lib/mailman/lists/$LISTNAME/config.pck and the entries in
 > /var/lib/mailman/data/virtual-mailman

This depends on your MTA.  The generic Mailman files removed are:
1.  Any (stale) lockfiles for that list.
2.  Any held messages for that list (you want to decide about these
    before deleting the list!)
3.  The list configuration directory and all files in it.  This may
    include a backup of the config.pck, pending.pck, and request.pck
    as well.

You probably don't need any of those, though, except for config.pck.

It appears your MTA is Postfix.  In that case, it attempts to modify
(NOT remove) the "aliases" and "virtual-mailman" files in Mailman's
DATA_DIR, then asks the MTA to merge them to the system aliases file.
I haven't analyzed carefully but although it takes some care, it does
not seem to be bullet-proof against hand-edited files.

If it's not Postfix, there are no MTA-specific files removed in stock
Mailman: you have to edit the MTA config files that "hook up" the
appropriate aliases to Mailman.

 > When I restore both, have I restored the list?

Not quite.  You need to regenerate the alias maps in Postfix.  There
may be a better way (Mark will know) but the function _update_maps in
Mailman/MTA/Postfix.py can be used (as root or the owner of Postfix
files)

# cd /path/to/mailman/Mailman/MTA
# python
>>> import Postfix
>>> Postfix._update_maps()
>>> quit()

 > Background: testing migration to mailman3, and I want to start with a
 > partial migration, affecting only one little used virtualhost. I thought
 > that deleting the lists this virtualhost from mailman2 will allow me to
 > play around with them in mailman3 (after making the required changes to
 > the postfix configuration). But if I find that mailman3 has too many
 > drawbacks, I would prefer to undo the changes.
 > 
 > Alternatively, instead of calling rmlist I could just manually remove
 > the lists from virtual-mailman of mailman2, although, virtual-mailman
 > get automatically rewritten with each list creation or deletion, but
 > that's rather infrequent over here)

This is all you need to do.  However, you must be extremely careful
not to disturb the stanza markers for other lists, because that will
cause problems for removal (including removing or corrupting aliases
for lists that aren't being removed) and possibly creation.

Also, note that AFAIK there's no standard way to revert archives from
HyperKitty to your Mailman 2 format.  I believe HyperKitty can export
mbox files, which means that pipermail can import them, but I'm not
sure how that works, or whether that will preserve archive URLs.

Steve



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