[Mailman-Developers] Re: auto aprroval

[Barry A. Warsaw]

>>>>> "MT" == Mark Tearle <mtearle@tearle.com> writes:

    MT> The patch is buggy and I should really get around to updating
    MT> the Sourceforge web page about it.  It works OK if you create
    MT> a new list but doesn't detect if the field is missing in an
    MT> existing list and add it unfortunately.

    MT> I'm CC'ing mailman-developers to ask for advice, I know it
    MT> goes somewhere in the versioning code, but where?  And how do
    MT> I do it such that future upgrades etc don't break?

The trick is to bump the DATA_FILE_VERSION in Mailman/Version.py and
to add a little bit of code to Mailman/versions.py.

versions.py is the file that essentially updates the (logical)
database schema when it changes.  In the past there has been radical
surgery in the schema, but these days it's mostly just adding new
attributes to older lists.  Look for function NewVars() in versions.py
to see where you can add default settings for your new attributes.

When a MailList object is instantiated, its database -- which is kept
as a marshaled dictionary on disk -- contains an attribute
data_version which is compared against DATA_FILE_VERSION.  If the
latter is greater, then versions.py's Update() function is called.

This works fairly well in practice, but it breaks down when you have
multiple patches each bumping DATA_FILE_VERSION, e.g. your patch
cranks it to 23 while I make changes to the CVS to bump it to 27.
It's probably not enough of a pain to fix, since it's quite likely
that the whole mechanism will be overhauled for Mailman 3.0.

Cheers,
-Barry