What? A Luddite for Majordomo? Yes.
System Adminstrators can be divided into the white-hot geniuses and the
rest of us that just want to go home at the end of the day and have an
uninterrupted weekend. Or, as they say in aviation, there are bold
pilots and there are old pilots, there are no old bold pilots.
One of the top two or three requirements for a software package to me
has to do with quick, clean, little-or-no-impact-to-the-users upgrades.
Better yet if they are infrequent. Number 2, I like monolithic
packages. One executable to roll into place...or back out if things go bad.
I'm not big on messy, super-hero upgrades with 3000+ users who don't pay
any attention to your warnings to stay the *&^% away from software X for
Y hours...and a college is a 25x8x367 environment. Heartburn, migraines
and pressure, oh my!
I was interested in Mailman too, until I saw that upgrading would be
frequent, include Apache and Python (combinatorial problemation), and
was done by untaring and building in place, thus destroying the previous
constellation of whirling bits. This is hope as an upgrade success plan.
Now, I'm no genius and will freely admit it, but /if/ the MM crowd wants
acceptance in the heavy duty commercial arena, the name of the games is
/NOT/ just functionality...it has to include maintainability and
serviceability...which to me, MM ignore. 'Course I got huffily weeweed
all over when I tried to raise that issue on the MM list. And they said
I should get binaries from Linux...but the binaries aren't available for
my *nix and even if they were, they prolly wouldn't have much in the way
of support.
People will probably weewee over me here, too. But.......
Majordomo is very stable (a release every year, laughably infrequent),
perl that it needs is part of my *nix image and very well supported by
my *nix's vendor, and there's relatively few pieces...I can build MD
elsewhere and bring it in.
OK, I've got on my Nomex raincoat. Let fly.........
--
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Stewart Dean, Unix System Admin, Henderson Computer Resources
Center of Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York 12504
sdean@bard.edu voice: 845-758-7475, fax: 845-758-7035
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