How to upgrade Mailman and keep Let's Encrypt ?

[Lowell Gilbert]

William Dudley <wfdudley at gmail.com> writes:

> I'm running 11.4-RELEASE-p9, and obviously, it's time to move to 12.
>
> I'm running Mailman 2.1.34 which uses deprecated Python 27.
>
> I realized that when I move to FreeBSD 12, I will no longer have Python 27,
> so Mailman 2 will no longer work.

That's not actually true. Python2.7 is still present, and mailman2 still
works for now. I don't know, pragmatically speaking, when that will
cease to be the case.

> When I do "pkg search mailman), I find the following:
>
> mailman-2.1.34                 Mailing list manager with user-friendly web
> front-end
> py38-mailman-3.3.1             GNU Mailing List Management System, Core

According to my understanding, mailman3 is not currently a full
replacement for mailman2. 

> As an experiment, on a spare machine, I tried:
>
> pkg install py38-mailman-3.3.1
>
> However, there is a conflict between py38 and py37, and so pkg wants to
> uninstall:
>
> py37-acme-1.16.0,1             ACME protocol implementation in Python
> py37-certbot-1.16.0,1          Let's Encrypt client

Both of those can be built with python3.8 (anything from 3.6 on, I
think, based on their makefiles), so py38 is an option if you don't mind
having to compile those from ports. Also, mailman3 (again, according to
its makefile) can be built with any python from 3.5 on.

> That won't do, as I host several websites on the same machine with the
> mailman installation and they all want to have https (obviously).
>
> How do I solve this?

A common answer is to move from mailman to another list manager. mlmmj
seems to be popular for this purpose. Another common answer is to
continue to hang onto mailman2 in hopes that something else will emerge
before you need to make the jump to another option.

If you want to try mailman3 and stick with prebuilt packages, it might
make sense to create a python38 jail. It would have to share some data
access with the web servers, but that can be done safely.

Good luck.