[Mailman-Developers] Error detection

[Artur Skura]

Hello,

I would like to suggest enhancing error detection
routines in Mailman. Recently I have experienced a minor
file corruption, and the results were a bit frustrating.
Although the lists seemed to work fine, neither cron
jobs, command-line tool nor WWW interface would.

The cryptic message I got was always ending with:

$ ./checkdbs
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "./checkdbs", line 136, in ?
    main()
  File "./checkdbs", line 55, in main
    mlist = MailList.MailList(name)
  File "/usr/lib/mailman/Mailman/MailList.py", line 99, in __init__
    self.Lock()
  File "/usr/lib/mailman/Mailman/MailList.py", line 149, in Lock
    self.Load()
  File "/usr/lib/mailman/Mailman/MailList.py", line 573, in Load
    dict, e = self.__load(file)
  File "/usr/lib/mailman/Mailman/MailList.py", line 546, in __load
    dict = loadfunc(fp)
cPickle.UnpicklingError: unpickling stack underflow

It took a while to find out where I should look for the
error. I examined the value of fp, then checked out
databases in list directories and found out one of
config.pck's was corrupted. I overwrote it
with config.pck.last and everything started to
work fine. Maybe something could be done to 
give the user the cause of thje error in a more explicit
way? I thought Mailman  should open config.pck.last
automatically if config.pck is corrupted.


Best Regards,
Artur
-- 
http://www.amnesty.org.pl