[Mailman-Developers] Mailman exceptions, need help please

[Tomas Fasth]

Hi. I'm somewhat lost here, therefore the call for help.
I have an experiment installation of Mailman. It started out as 1.0b5 but is
now reflecting the cvs head of mailman sources at the
cvs.python.org:/projects/cvsroot repository. At some point while trying to
find an alternative for using aliases in sendmail (by defining a mailer and
a dispatch script), the post and deliver of mailman started to report
exceptions.
I did a clean sweep (I think) and reinstalled it several times. I also
switched between python 1.5 and 1.5.1. Nothing helped. Here's what is
reported in the error file when running python 1.5:

    Oct 16 21:45:23 1998 post: Traceback (innermost last):
    post:   File "/home/mailman/scripts/post", line 40, in ?
    post:      LogStdErr("error", "post")
    post:   File "/home/mailman/Mailman/Logging/Utils.py", line 41, in
LogStdErr
    post:      multi = MultiLogger(sys.__stdout__, sys.stderr)
    post: AttributeError :  __stdout__
    Oct 16 21:45:29 1998 deliver: Traceback (innermost last):
    deliver:   File "/home/mailman/scripts/deliver", line 41, in ?
    deliver:      LogStdErr("error", "deliver")
    deliver:   File "/home/mailman/Mailman/Logging/Utils.py", line 41, in
LogStdErr
    deliver:      multi = MultiLogger(sys.__stdout__, sys.stderr)
    deliver: AttributeError :  __stdout__

Apparently this has something to do with an incompatibility between python
1.5 and 1.5.1.
Here's what is reported in the error file when running python 1.5.1:

Oct 16 21:48:41 1998 deliver (child): Traceback (innermost last):
deliver (child):   File "/home/mailman/scripts/deliver", line 154, in ?
deliver (child):      main()
deliver (child):   File "/home/mailman/scripts/deliver", line 49, in main
deliver (child):      do_child()
deliver (child):   File "/home/mailman/scripts/deliver", line 57, in
do_child
deliver (child):      spawns = string.atol(sys.stdin.readline()[:-1])
deliver (child): ValueError :  empty string for atol()

This is the one I'm lost with. The deliver script is put into action in
~mailman/Mailman/Deliver.py by calling os.popen(). There seem to be a
problem using that pipe. What's written in one end don't seem to show up in
the other end.
Is this a known problem that can occur in some circumstances (possibly
python generic)?

Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks.

--tomas