Since writing Progress in the new server, I’ve been working on the Mailman3 stuff. First I tried installing it from Debian packages. One of the dependencies was for a proxy server, and since it couldn’t resolve the one using Apache (even though mod_proxy is in the default Apache conf-available) it installed nginx, a whole different web server. Seems like overkill to me. Also, I couldn’t find installation instructions that seemed to correspond with what the package installed. I could find them for Debian 10, but things have changed since then.
So for the last 3 days I’ve been trying to install it the manual way, using pip install in a virtual environment. It’s been going very slowly. I finally got to the point where I could create a mailing list, but when I try to import the Mailman the configuration for that list from the old server using the `import21` command, I get a python error. As near as I can tell, the error message indicates that somebody is using the `with` command with a Path object, but the stack trace is coming from deep within a package that used by another package that used by another package that’s used by Django, so that doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. Surely I’m not the first person to try to import an old configuration?
I’m also seeing weird occasional errors from it trying to access an invalid url, like /api on the proxied server, and I have no idea why that’s happening.
I’m almost at the point where I want to kill this entire “manual” install and try the Debian packages again. Maybe the experience I’ve gained from these days of frustration will help me understand what was going wrong when I tried it that way.
Maybe this time I should document the things I found about how the documentation is wrong, and send them to somebody on the Mailman team?
I knew this wasn’t going to be easy, but I didn’t think it would be this hard.