[Pkg-mailman-hackers] Bug#482880: removing mailman without purging leaves behind rabid logrotate program

[Stijn van Drongelen]

Package: mailman
Version: 1:2.1.9-7

When someone removes mailman without purging (which keeps config
files), two of the files that are kept are /etc/logrotate.d/mailman
and /var/run/mailman/mailman.pid. The pidfile is never changed and
therefore still contains the last PID mailman had. The logrotate
script uses that file to kill the process with the PID specified in
the pidfile.

So if one removes mailman, the pidfile becomes stale, but the
logrotator still works. This is why I (and I guess many others) got
e-mails from cron saying

"/etc/cron.daily/logrotate:
sh: line 1: kill: (2815) - No such process"

However, in the event that 2815 is actually a PID of an existing
process, it isn't mailman (because we removed it), but it's still
killed!