[Mailman-Developers] Trouble upgrading from ancient version

[Terri Oda]

On Wed, Nov 19, 2003 at 07:06:21PM -0600, mjinks at uchicago.edu wrote:
> TypeError: HoldSubscription() takes exactly 6 arguments (4 given)
> *** Error code 1
> make: Fatal error: Command failed for target `update'
> 
> 
> Well, I'm clueless.  Anybody got any tips?  Known issue?  PEBCAK?

Known issue -- somewhere in the upgrade docs it actually tells you that bad
things may happen if you have pending requests, and this is the bad thing
that happens.

(Yes, it happened to one of the installations I maintain.  No, I didn't do
the upgrade, but I can hardly blame the person who did for not noticing that
little tidbit.)

Anyhow, the problem is that the subscriptions now include a "real name"
field (can't remember what the other missing field is from 1.*) and the
converter doesn't fail gracefully and blank out those fields the way it
ought to when converting.  When it happened to us, I didn't have time to
fuss with the source and there weren't that many pending requests, so I just
figured out the affected addresses and we did them manually.

So my guess is that your options are: 
(1) clear the queue from the old installation
(2) handle those subscriptions manually and remove the pending info
(3) write a patch to convert them automatically

The latter's probably not actually that hard and would likely be appreciated
by people who follow. :) 

 Terri