[Mailman-developers] Re: [Matrix-SIG] Testing transition to mailman list processor

[Ken Manheimer]

On Tue, 17 Mar 1998, Charles G Waldman wrote:

> Ken Manheimer writes:
>  > The Matrix-SIG mailing list has just been migrated to mailman, a
>  > python-based maillist management system.
> 
> Hi Ken - this is off-topic for the Matrix-SIG - more of a "mailman"
> question.  I've been meaning to mention this to someone,  I'm not sure 
> who the maintainer is of the Mailman package - is it you?  Anyway,
> your message provides me with the excuse to write you.... :-)

At the moment i'm carrying the ball, basically in order to get mailman
in full gear at python.org.  As you may know, we're using a version
that's the most recent one recovered after loss of the server where john
viega was developing and running mailman, and basically several months
of work were lost.  John is around and interested in continuing to work
w/mailman, but deep in a grad school thesis, so it'll a little while
before he gets to concentrate on it again.  However, his intention is to
come back to it, especially now that several people have also expressed
interest. 

Towards the end of collaborating on mailman, we've set up a
mailman-developers@python.org maillist - see
http://www.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-developers .  I recommend
joining that list, right off - it's not yet particularly active (i, for
one, am too busy scrambling just to get the system shipshape and in
production at this moment to do planning), but i expect we will be using
it in earnest as time goes by.  In addition, barry warsaw and i are
setting up a mechanism (which barry devised) which should enable cvs
sharing of the mailman sources across the internet, so we can do widely
distributed coordinated development - at least have a convenient way to
share modifications.  We'll be pursuing this eventually, as time allows.

> I recently set up "mailman" at my company, for our internal use.  I
> grabbed the distribution from python.org as well as the klm patches.
> It basically works fine, but I noticed one oddness.
> 
> If there is a line in a mail message that starts with "From ",
> preceded by a blank line, the message is truncated in the message
> archives.   For instance:
> 
> >From where I'm sitting, it looks like a very simple bug to fix.
> 
> (This part of the message won't be archived)
> 
> Has anybody fixed this yet?  I don't want to waste time on this if 
> it has already been fixed.

My work on the version here has diverged from the adapted version of
pipermail that john was shipping with mailman - andrew kuchling is
working here (handily enough!), so we're using a newer version of
pipermail.  We should be packaging up the whole shebang, pipermail and
mailman, for use by others within the next few/several weeks, but in the
meanwhile you're sorta on your own re the internal pipermail.

That said, i do have an idea about what is needed.  I am pretty sure
that the line starting with "From " is being treated as the start of a
new message, which probably is unarchivable and dropped on the floor, or
perhaps getting put at some random place in the archive.  The easy thing
to do would be to preprocess the messages before they're put in the
archive file so lines in the body starting with "From ", and following a
blank line, have ">" prepended.  I think the place to do this is in
mailman/modules/mm_archive.py, Archiver.ArchiveMail(), but you'd have to
scope it out a bit. 

Phew!  This may be a bit more than you bargained for.  I hope you don't
mind that i'm cc'ing this to mailman developers - the info may well
be useful for someone else.

Ken Manheimer
klm@python.org