4.14. How do I upgrade from Mailman 2.0.x to Mailman 2.0.y
Unfortunately you do require a little downtime for this, however it should be measured in single digit minutes, possibly less:
1) Retrieve the sources for the new Mailman. eg
$ snarf http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/mailman/mailman-2.0.10.tgz
2) Follow the instructions for building Mailman exactly all the way up the point of installing it, but DO NOT install it. You can find the ./configure line you used last time by looking in the config.status file in old source tree.
2a) You may want to make a backup of your current installation, e.g. by doing a "tar cvf - /home/mailman | gzip -c -9 > mymmbackup.tgz".
3)Stop the following daemons: MTA (exim/postfix/qmail/whatever), web server (apache/thttpd/etc), and cron. eg
# /etc/init.d/cron stop # /etc/init.d/apache stop # /etc/init.d/sendmail stop
4) Install your newly configured and built Mailman:
# make install
5) Restart the services you previously stopped.
# /etc/init.d/cron start # /etc/init.d/apache start # /etc/init.d/sendmail start
This gives a short outage, but shutting down those services ensures that nothing is fiddling with your installation at the time when it is being upgraded.
BAW: I'll note that if you're feeling reeaaallly gutsy and you're just upgrading within a minor rev series (e.g. MM2.0.8->2.0.9->2.0.10) you might be able to do a live install without shutting down your servers. Just install the new version on top of the old one. I definitely wouldn't recommend this for busy sites though.
Converted from the Mailman FAQ Wizard
This is one of many Frequently Asked Questions.