As previously reported by globefish in thread mailman broken on 11.1 - openSUSE Forums mailman is totally broken in the 11.1 distro. Updating to the patched version of 2.1.11 did not help. There were still errors like this (from the error logfile):
admin(27034): ----- Mailman Version: 2.1.11 -----]
admin(27034): ----- Traceback ------]
admin(27034): Traceback (most recent call last):
admin(27034): File “/usr/lib/mailman/scripts/driver”, line 101, in run_main
admin(27034): main()
admin(27034): File “/usr/lib/mailman/Mailman/Cgi/subscribe.py”, line 96, in main
admin(27034): process_form(mlist, doc, cgidata, language)
admin(27034): File “/usr/lib/mailman/Mailman/Cgi/subscribe.py”, line 176, in proce
ss_form
admin(27034): mlist.AddMember(userdesc, remote)
admin(27034): File “/usr/lib/mailman/Mailman/MailList.py”, line 923, in AddMember
admin(27034): ‘subscriptions to %(realname)s require moderator approval’)
admin(27034): TypeError: exceptions must be classes or instances, not str
admin(27034): ----- Python Information -----]
admin(27034): sys.version = 2.6 (r26:66714, Dec 3 2008, 06:05:48)
[GCC 4.3.2 [gcc-4_3-branch revision 141291]]
Finally I found a build by reinauer downloadable at
http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/reinauer/openSUSE_11.1/i586/mailman-2.1.12-9.1.i586.rpm which seems to work well (so far). Credits for good work go to him.
I hope this will help others too, as mailman is an important package in widespead use.