I'm having a bit of hard time installing Mailman from ports to an
alternative `DESTDIR` chroot on OpenBSD 5.8 -stable, GENERIC.MP amd64. I
have a working Mailman setup in a non-chroot environment and I'm trying
to move it to a chroot. I've partially succeeded in doing so, but it
seems `DESTDIR` is not working on this port.
For those not yet aware, Mailman is a mailing list software written in
Python that interacts with CGI to provide a web interface for mail
archives and control panel.
By default, Mailman packages will install to `/usr/local/lib/mailman/`.
For this to work with Mailman's web interface, both OpenBSD httpd(8) and
slowcgi(8) must be chrooted to `/` to be able to access Mailman's needed
files. For obvious reasons, running slowcgi with `-p /` is not
recommended from security perspective and is actively discouraged by
OpenBSD developers.
Ideally, Mailman should be installed to a chroot at `/var/www`
(`/var/www/usr/local/lib/mailman/`). This is what I'm looking for.
Because the packages for Mailman don't do this by default, I am trying
to use the ports to customize the DESTDIR.
It seems this port doesn't play very well with `DESTDIR` however. I've
tried at least
cd /usr/ports/mail/mailman/
make
DESTDIR="/var/www" make install
among other similar things (e.g. using `env DESTDIR="/var/www"`), but it
seems Mailman will be installed to `DESTDIR=/` (that is,
`/usr/local/lib/mailman/`).
The Makefile itself has this comment:
# gnu still breaks the pathes as prefix is actually mailman's home
CONFIGURE_STYLE= simple
This might be the blocker, but I am not sure what to do with it. Maybe
any of porters have a better idea.
Right now I also tried creating a package and installing it with
`pkg_add(1)` to work around the issue:
cd /usr/ports/mail/mailman/
make
make uninstall package clean
pkg_add -B /var/www /usr/ports/packages/amd64/all/mailman-2.1.20.tgz
and this seems to be a success, assuming the dependencies are okay and
also in the chroot (they're not, yet). Now my problem is getting
`DESTDIR` for the dependencies. I'm not also sure if using `pkg_add(1)`
like this is a great idea.
The closest advice I found for installing Mailman to an OpenBSD chroot
was a `mailman-users` mailing list post from 2008.[1] However, this
advice is quite dated and relies too much on copying Mailman manually
and building Mailman from source instead of ports. Not what I'm looking
for.
It seems `/ports/mail/mailman/` hasn't changed in `-current` tree or in
the past 8 months, so I could probably reproduce my issue there but I've
not yet tested so.
I could move or copy Mailman and all of its dependencies manually under
`/var/www` chroot, but this doesn't seem to be a good idea from
maintenance perspective.
Can I do something to build Mailman and its dependencies with
`DESTDIR=/var/www` for easier maintenance?
[1]: https://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-users/2008-April/061331.html
