[Pkg-mailman-hackers] multilingual templates in Debian mailman [was: a picture, and a problem with the Debian package]

[Lionel Elie Mamane]

(I'm the currently least inactive maintainer of the Debian package.)

On Thu, Jun 22, 2006 at 10:40:49PM +0200, Fil wrote:

> The problem was that she had
> configured the list to be in Spanish, but it kept sending welcome messages
> in English.
> I finally traced it to the Debian installation,

When installing the mailman package, you got asked which languages you
want that site to support. You didn't include Spanish in the list. Use
"dpkg-reconfigure mailman" to change the list. All languages supported
by a list on the site are forced on, meaning if you turn them off,
they are turned back on in your back.

> which has weird symlinks:
>         /var/lib/mailman/templates -> /etc/mailman

Templates can be changed by the administrator and are thus considered
as configuration files and are thus in /etc/, as per Debian policy
(and Linux FHS). This guarantees that a package upgrade won't override
changes the administrator may have made.

> whereas /usr/share/mailman/ contains all the templates (including es/, which
> she linked into /etc/mailman/ and solved the problem)

That linking may or may not confuse the maintainer scripts of the
package, I'm not sure. If you want to play it safe, have your user
remove that link and use "dpkg-reconfigure mailman".

-- 
Lionel