[Mailman-developers] forwarded message from Andrew Kuchling

[Ken Manheimer]

I'm surfacing for a moment to respond to some of the current issues,
particularly the mime item, below.  I only have a moment - i need to
prepare some notes to instruct some other project and system folks
around here in mailman setup, so they can give it a try for some of
their lists (yay!)

On Sun, 26 Apr 1998, Ken Manheimer wrote:

> It looks like there may be a problem, or at least some sendmail
> (8.8.8) sensitivities, in the way that mailman is mime-encoding the
> digests.  Does anyone have enough MIME acquaintance to have an
> immediate idea whether or not the current format is correct?  In any
> case, i responded that i would look into the problem tomorrow, and
> plan to look into using the python distribution mime facilities - in
> particular mimify.py - to use known quantities for the encoding.
> Clues would be appreciated...

I should add, first of all, that i did suggest to them that they
investigate whether sendmail 8.8.8 has any related sensitivities, since
sendmail shouldn't be crashing, period, particularly from malformed
content.  John, i don't have any more details than the message provided,
though i'll try to remember to ask them if they can provide any, when i
contact them about the following change.

I've actually started to revamp the digest mechanism, to be able to
refine the mime presentation in an easy way.  I'll go into that below. 
For the meanwhile, i'm using mimetools.choose_boundary() to substitute
for the boundary delimiter of the mime-format digests, in the hopes that
this might avoid triggering the sendmail bug, and to provide a somewhat
more robust primary delimiter besides.

What i'm planning to do (and have already started, in my enthusiasm) is
to create a Digest class (in mm_message) to take all the digest pieces
and keep them in a presentation-neutral format.  It will be able to
present them in both plain or mime formats.  I'm planning to
elaborate the mime format a bit, and to look into using a delimiter in
the plain format which conforms to an old burstable-digest standard that
was floating around the net.

The elaboration of the mime format has the whole message as a
multipart/mixed type.  The top section - the masthead - will have a few
text/plain; charset=us-ascii sections:

 - the digest header, if any
 - admin info (addresses, URLs, etc)
 - the toc

followed by the digest contents, as a multipart/digest section, with a
simple boundary.

Finally there'll be a text/plain footer, if any.  (I'm pretty close to
convinced it's better to *not* have a default setting for the footer - a
generic one is clutter, with info better served by the masthead
admin-info section, and a list-specific one is up to the maillist
admin.) 

What do people think?  This layout is used by a maillist to which i
subscribe, and i like it.  But i'm not sure what the conventional wisdom
is about these things.  (I will respond in a different message to john's
conventional wisdom about having digests default to plain, instead of
mime...)

Ken