From kiko at async.com.br  Wed Aug  4 23:34:13 2004
From: kiko at async.com.br (Christian Robottom Reis)
Date: Wed Aug  4 23:34:22 2004
Subject: [Mailman-Developers] Bug 930819 -- onload focus for admlogin.html
In-Reply-To: <26726.1088081769@kanga.nu>
References: <20040618233842.GD5628@async.com.br> <26726.1088081769@kanga.nu>
Message-ID: <20040804213413.GA4708@async.com.br>

On Thu, Jun 24, 2004 at 08:56:09AM -0400, J C Lawrence wrote:
> On Fri, 18 Jun 2004 20:38:42 -0300
> Christian Robottom Reis <kiko@async.com.br> wrote:
> 
> > Just a heads-up for bug 930819, which has a patch (two now) that adds
> > onload form focus to the password entry in admlogin.html, a usability
> > improvement for people using graphical browsers and maintaining many
> > lists.
> 
> +1

What's the process in Mailman when a patch has been posted and sits idle
without an answer? Should I use the linus-resend-script for submission,
ping the mailing list monthly, or befriend someone with CVS commit
permission? 

The real reason I keep at this is that I like to keep my home directory
clean, and there's a pending patch there that wants to be applied.

(And I thought Barry *was* my friend <wink>)

Take care,
--
Christian Robottom Reis | http://async.com.br/~kiko/ | [+55 16] 3361 2331
From claw at kanga.nu  Thu Aug  5 00:44:08 2004
From: claw at kanga.nu (J C Lawrence)
Date: Thu Aug  5 00:44:11 2004
Subject: [Mailman-Developers] Bug 930819 -- onload focus for admlogin.html
In-Reply-To: Message from Christian Robottom Reis <kiko@async.com.br> of "Wed,
	04 Aug 2004 18:34:13 -0300." <20040804213413.GA4708@async.com.br> 
References: <20040618233842.GD5628@async.com.br> <26726.1088081769@kanga.nu>
	<20040804213413.GA4708@async.com.br> 
Message-ID: <31130.1091659448@kanga.nu>

On Wed, 4 Aug 2004 18:34:13 -0300 
Christian Robottom Reis <kiko@async.com.br> wrote:

> What's the process in Mailman when a patch has been posted and sits
> idle without an answer? 

Add it to SF's bug/patch thing.

> (And I thought Barry *was* my friend <wink>)

He appears to be unusually busy.  

-- 
J C Lawrence
---------(*)                Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas.
claw@kanga.nu               He lived as a devil, eh?
http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/  Evil is a name of a foeman, as I live.
From barry at python.org  Thu Aug  5 00:56:29 2004
From: barry at python.org (Barry Warsaw)
Date: Thu Aug  5 00:56:23 2004
Subject: [Mailman-Developers] Bug 930819 -- onload focus for admlogin.html
In-Reply-To: <31130.1091659448@kanga.nu>
References: <20040618233842.GD5628@async.com.br> <26726.1088081769@kanga.nu>
	<20040804213413.GA4708@async.com.br>   <31130.1091659448@kanga.nu>
Message-ID: <1091660189.8321.325.camel@localhost>

On Wed, 2004-08-04 at 18:44, J C Lawrence wrote:

> > (And I thought Barry *was* my friend <wink>)
> 
> He appears to be unusually busy.  

The byproduct of starting a new job. ;}

But I still have much love for Mailman and y'all, so I haven't forgotten
ya.  I do hope that things will calm down soon and I can get back to
hacking on Mailman.  And take heart: the American football season will
be starting soon, so I'll be back to my favorite past-time of rooting
for my team with a beer and a laptop every Sunday afternoon. :)

-Barry

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From philb at philb.us  Thu Aug  5 02:23:23 2004
From: philb at philb.us (Phil Barnett)
Date: Thu Aug  5 02:23:29 2004
Subject: [Mailman-Developers] Bug 930819 -- onload focus for admlogin.html
In-Reply-To: <1091660189.8321.325.camel@localhost>
References: <20040618233842.GD5628@async.com.br> <31130.1091659448@kanga.nu>
	<1091660189.8321.325.camel@localhost>
Message-ID: <200408042023.25515.philb@philb.us>

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

On Wednesday 04 August 2004 18:56, Barry Warsaw wrote:

> And take heart: the American football season will
> be starting soon, so I'll be back to my favorite past-time of rooting
> for my team with a beer and a laptop every Sunday afternoon. :)

What kind of beer does your laptop like?

- -- 

"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place.
Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are,
by definition, not smart enough to debug it." - Brian W. Kernighan
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From mailman-dev at thepeters.org  Fri Aug  6 22:39:49 2004
From: mailman-dev at thepeters.org (Mark Peters)
Date: Fri Aug  6 22:41:18 2004
Subject: [Mailman-Developers] Mailman Backup via PHP script
Message-ID: <6.1.2.0.0.20040806163948.02e98ec0@mail.thepeters.org>


I created a PHP script which can be used to list of the subscribers to a 
Mailman list, which does not require root access to run.

http://www.thepeters.org/mailmanBackup.htm

This is provide as-is.  Use at your own risk.

M


From Nigel.Metheringham at dev.intechnology.co.uk  Sat Aug  7 15:53:16 2004
From: Nigel.Metheringham at dev.intechnology.co.uk (Nigel Metheringham)
Date: Sat Aug  7 15:53:23 2004
Subject: [Mailman-Developers] Relocating a list
In-Reply-To: <1089877607.5059.9.camel@angua.localnet>
References: <1089877607.5059.9.camel@angua.localnet>
Message-ID: <1091886795.3456.2.camel@angua.localnet>

On Thu, 2004-07-15 at 08:46, Nigel Metheringham wrote:

> I've just been looking at Barry's notes for his list relocation at
>   http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-developers@python.org/msg03127.html

I tried this on a test list, and it fails...

Doing the step:-
% bin/withlist -l -r fix_url exim-dev
Importing fix_url...
Running fix_url.fix_url()...
Loading list exim-dev (locked)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "bin/withlist", line 275, in ?
    main()
  File "bin/withlist", line 256, in main
    r = do_list(listname, args, func)
  File "bin/withlist", line 182, in do_list
    m = MailList.MailList(listname, lock=LOCK)
  File "/home/services/mailman/Mailman/MailList.py", line 126, in __init__
    self.Lock()
  File "/home/services/mailman/Mailman/MailList.py", line 163, in Lock
    self.Load()
  File "/home/services/mailman/Mailman/MailList.py", line 630, in Load
    self.CheckValues()
  File "/home/services/mailman/Mailman/MailList.py", line 712, in CheckValues
    for name, pattern, desc, emptyflag in self.topics:
  File "/home/services/mailman/Mailman/MailList.py", line 144, in __getattr__
    raise AttributeError, name
AttributeError: topics

Basically its fixing up topic which doesn't exist in 2.0.x.  I'll see
about working round this...

	Nigel.

-- 
[ Nigel Metheringham           Nigel.Metheringham@InTechnology.co.uk ]
[ - Comments in this message are my own and not ITO opinion/policy - ]


From ajh at steamballoon.com  Mon Aug  9 17:49:20 2004
From: ajh at steamballoon.com (Andrew J. Hutton)
Date: Mon Aug  9 17:49:57 2004
Subject: [Mailman-Developers] -1 Moderator Requests Waiting.
Message-ID: <200408091149.20997.ajh@steamballoon.com>

A few weeks ago all my lists on two different machines suddently started 
sending out daily notifications of -1 Moderator Requests waiting for 
approval.

How do I fix this?
From brad.knowles at skynet.be  Mon Aug  9 17:54:54 2004
From: brad.knowles at skynet.be (Brad Knowles)
Date: Mon Aug  9 17:55:03 2004
Subject: [Mailman-Developers] -1 Moderator Requests Waiting.
In-Reply-To: <200408091149.20997.ajh@steamballoon.com>
References: <200408091149.20997.ajh@steamballoon.com>
Message-ID: <p06002004bd3d4ea3aca5@[10.0.1.2]>

At 11:49 AM -0400 2004-08-09, Andrew J. Hutton wrote:

>  A few weeks ago all my lists on two different machines suddently started
>  sending out daily notifications of -1 Moderator Requests waiting for
>  approval.

	If you had followed the instructions at 
<http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py?req=show&file=faq01.022.htp>, 
you would have easily found the Mailman FAQ entry at 
<http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py?req=show&file=faq03.038.htp>.

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad.knowles@skynet.be>

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

     -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
     Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755

   SAGE member since 1995.  See <http://www.sage.org/> for more info.
From chris at cogdon.org  Thu Aug 12 02:12:49 2004
From: chris at cogdon.org (Chris Cogdon)
Date: Thu Aug 12 02:12:53 2004
Subject: [Mailman-Developers] Patch for easy spam forwarding.
Message-ID: <58838620-EBF4-11D8-89AD-000A95E3823E@cogdon.org>

Hey folks!

I've been using mailman for some time. One process I do is to forward 
all spam that has been held by the list to Spamcop. This involves 
hitting 'discard', the 'forward' option, plus pasting a email address 
into the following input box. fairly easy, but gets REAL old after a 
while.

So, I've modified Mailman to include a new processing option called 
'Spam', which will discard the mail, plus forward it to a configurable 
mail handler (be it spamcop or anything else). This is independent of 
the existing forwarding options, too. If the address is left empty, the 
'Spam' option doesn't appear.

I'm very happy to deliver the patch file for this, if folk want it, or 
even want to include it in the project.

One thing I've not handled yet is the i18n. The 'po' file format is 
easy enough to figure out, but... adding in new strings to a file seems 
to require renumbering all the later existing strings, and repeating 
that for every single language, which seems awfully awkward. Is there 
an 'easy' way to handle making such modifications ?

Thank you for your consideration!


-- 
    ("`-/")_.-'"``-._        Chris Cogdon <chris@cogdon.org>
     . . `; -._    )-;-,_`)
    (v_,)'  _  )`-.\  ``-'
   _.- _..-_/ / ((.'
((,.-'   ((,/   fL

From Fergus.Donohue at dcu.ie  Mon Aug 16 17:26:47 2004
From: Fergus.Donohue at dcu.ie (Fergus Donohue)
Date: Mon Aug 16 17:26:44 2004
Subject: [Mailman-Developers] Upgrade from 2.0 to 2.1.5 breaks on
	pending_subscriptions.db
Message-ID: <4120D237.5070006@dcu.ie>

Has anyone else come across this and if so what's the solution?

I'm running an upgrade of our mailman install in a test environment and it's breaking with the following error. I'm running on Solaris 8 with Python 2.3.4. The 2.0 version of Mailman was using python 1.6.

phoenix on old-hawk {731}# ls -la /home/misc/mailman/data/pending_subscriptio>
-rw-rw-r--   1 mailman  mailman       97 Aug 16 14:27 /home/misc/mailman/data/pending_subscriptions.db
phoenix on old-hawk {732}# tail -10 fd.ins.3
Updating Mailman 2.0 pending_subscriptions.db database
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "bin/update", line 780, in ?
    errors = main()
  File "bin/update", line 704, in main
    update_pending()
  File "bin/update", line 583, in update_pending
    addr = data[0].address
AttributeError: 'str' object has no attribute 'address'
make: *** [update] Error 1

If I dump pending_subscriptions on a box that can dump .db files I get:

phoenix {353}# ./dumpdb /tmp/pending_subscriptions.db
{   448473: ('emanuel.soreteanonescu2@mail.dcu.ie', 'cycbtsvf', 0, 1089674437),
    'lastculltime': 1089723840}
phoenix {354}#

Does anyone have any ideas what's going on? 
Thanks,

Fergus.

From chris at jellybaby.net  Tue Aug 17 11:09:17 2004
From: chris at jellybaby.net (Chris Boulter)
Date: Tue Aug 17 11:09:19 2004
Subject: [Mailman-Developers] Permission problem on CGIs reading config.pck
Message-ID: <20040817090917.GC11013@jellybaby.net>

Hi,

I'm getting an intermittent error with our (very non-standard) Mailman
installation. Things are working fine in our (also non-standard)
production installation, but not in development - so possibly I've broken
something with my most recent enhancements, or possibly the installation
is different.

The error is:
    Permission denied: '/usr/local/mailman/lists/accounting/config.pck'

The file mentioned:
    -rw-rw----   1 root     mailman     3678 Aug 16 09:00
    /usr/local/mailman/lists/accounting/config.pck

All config.pck files seem to have the same ownership on production
as these, but the error is not occurring there.

Here are the Apache processes on development, which also look the same as on
production:

cboulter@serpens:~$ ps -ef|grep apache
    root  4824     1  0   Aug 06 ?        0:00 /usr/local/apache/bin/httpd
  nobody 23519  4824  0   Aug 12 ?        0:00 /usr/local/apache/bin/httpd
  nobody  4827  4824  0   Aug 06 ?        0:01 /usr/local/apache/bin/httpd
  nobody  4825  4824  0   Aug 06 ?        0:01 /usr/local/apache/bin/httpd
  nobody  4826  4824  0   Aug 06 ?        0:01 /usr/local/apache/bin/httpd
  nobody  4828  4824  0   Aug 06 ?        0:01 /usr/local/apache/bin/httpd
  nobody  4829  4824  0   Aug 06 ?        0:01 /usr/local/apache/bin/httpd
  nobody  4831  4824  0   Aug 06 ?        0:01 /usr/local/apache/bin/httpd
  nobody  5066  4824  0   Aug 06 ?        0:01 /usr/local/apache/bin/httpd
  nobody 22039  4824  0   Aug 06 ?        0:01 /usr/local/apache/bin/httpd
  nobody 20334  4824  0   Aug 09 ?        0:01 /usr/local/apache/bin/httpd

Is the problem caused by apache running as 'nobody', so that the Mailman
CGI scripts don't have permission to read config.pck? Why doesn't this
happen on production, where things seem to be the same?

Finally, the full text of the error (line numbers won't match any standard
distribution). I'd be very grateful for any help.

Many thanks,
Chris

<head><title>Bug in Mailman version 2.1.2</title></head>
<body bgcolor=#ffffff><h2>Bug in Mailman version 2.1.2</h2>
<p><h3>We're sorry, we hit a bug!</h3>

<p>If you would like to help us identify the problem,
please email a copy of this page to the webmaster for this site with
a description of what happened.  Thanks!

<h4>Traceback:</h4><p><pre>
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/local/mailman/scripts/driver", line 87, in run_main
    main()
  File "/usr/local/mailman/Mailman/Cgi/manage-subs.py", line 153, in main
    lists_of_memb = lists_of_member(domain, safeuser)
  File "/usr/local/mailman/Mailman/Cgi/manage-subs.py", line 598, in
lists_of_member
    glist = MailList.MailList(listname, lock=0)
  File "/usr/local/mailman/Mailman/MailList.py", line 124, in __init__
    self.Load()
  File "/usr/local/mailman/Mailman/MailList.py", line 583, in Load
    dict, e = self.__load(file)
  File "/usr/local/mailman/Mailman/MailList.py", line 549, in __load
    fp = open(dbfile)
IOError: [Errno 13] Permission denied:
'/usr/local/mailman/lists/accounting/config.pck'


</pre></body>
<p><hr><h4>Python information:</h4>

<p><table>
<tr><th>Variable</th><th>Value</th></tr>

<tr><td><tt>sys.version</tt></td><td> 2.2.2 (#1, Feb 17 2003, 05:38:40) 
[GCC 3.2.2] </td></tr>
<tr><td><tt>sys.executable</tt></td><td> /usr/local/bin/python </td></tr>
<tr><td><tt>sys.prefix</tt></td><td> /usr/local </td></tr>
<tr><td><tt>sys.exec_prefix</tt></td><td> /usr/local </td></tr>
<tr><td><tt>sys.path</tt></td><td> /usr/local </td></tr>
<tr><td><tt>sys.platform</tt></td><td> sunos5 </td></tr>
</table>
<p><hr><h4>Environment variables:</h4>

<p><table>
<tr><th>Variable</th><th>Value</th></tr>

<tr><td><tt> HTTP_COOKIE </tt></td><td>
NSES40Session=0%253A41208c56%253A12fc1ce838a494bb; LBS_Logout=logged_in;
JSESSIONID=serpens.london.edu-1ec%253A41208c5d%253Ad3fa18da5385374;
JSESSIONID=serpens.london.edu-2a%253A41208c67%253Ad243264513d677c5
</td></tr>
<tr><td><tt> SERVER_SOFTWARE </tt></td><td> Apache/1.3.27 (Unix)
</td></tr>
<tr><td><tt> PYTHONPATH </tt></td><td> /usr/local/mailman </td></tr>
<tr><td><tt> SCRIPT_FILENAME </tt></td><td>
/usr/local/mailman/cgi-bin/manage-subs </td></tr>
<tr><td><tt> SERVER_ADMIN </tt></td><td> [no address given] </td></tr>
<tr><td><tt> SCRIPT_NAME </tt></td><td> /mailman/manage-subs </td></tr>
<tr><td><tt> SERVER_SIGNATURE </tt></td><td> <ADDRESS>Apache/1.3.27 Server
at serpens.london.edu Port 80</ADDRESS>
</td></tr>
<tr><td><tt> REQUEST_METHOD </tt></td><td> GET </td></tr>
<tr><td><tt> HTTP_HOST </tt></td><td> serpens.london.edu </td></tr>
<tr><td><tt> PATH_INFO </tt></td><td>
/serpens.london.edu/xxx@london.edu </td></tr>
<tr><td><tt> SERVER_PROTOCOL </tt></td><td> HTTP/1.0 </td></tr>
<tr><td><tt> QUERY_STRING </tt></td><td>  </td></tr>
<tr><td><tt> TZ </tt></td><td> GB </td></tr>
<tr><td><tt> REQUEST_URI </tt></td><td>
/mailman/manage-subs/serpens.london.edu/xxx@london.edu </td></tr>
<tr><td><tt> HTTP_ACCEPT </tt></td><td> image/gif, image/x-xbitmap,
image/jpeg, image/pjpeg, application/vnd.ms-powerpoint,
application/vnd.ms-excel, application/msword,
application/x-shockwave-flash, */* </td></tr>
<tr><td><tt> PATH_TRANSLATED </tt></td><td>
/usr/local/apache/htdocs/serpens.london.edu/xxx@london.edu </td></tr>
<tr><td><tt> HTTP_USER_AGENT </tt></td><td> Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE
6.0; Windows NT 5.1) </td></tr>
<tr><td><tt> HTTP_CONNECTION </tt></td><td> Keep-Alive </td></tr>
<tr><td><tt> SERVER_NAME </tt></td><td> serpens.london.edu </td></tr>
<tr><td><tt> REMOTE_ADDR </tt></td><td> 163.119.71.11 </td></tr>
<tr><td><tt> REMOTE_PORT </tt></td><td> 45213 </td></tr>
<tr><td><tt> HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE </tt></td><td> en-gb </td></tr>
<tr><td><tt> SERVER_ADDR </tt></td><td> 163.119.71.11 </td></tr>
<tr><td><tt> SERVER_PORT </tt></td><td> 80 </td></tr>
<tr><td><tt> GATEWAY_INTERFACE </tt></td><td> CGI/1.1 </td></tr>
<tr><td><tt> HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING </tt></td><td> gzip, deflate </td></tr>
<tr><td><tt> UNIQUE_ID </tt></td><td> QSCMaqN3RwsAABLcFtQ </td></tr>
<tr><td><tt> DOCUMENT_ROOT </tt></td><td> /usr/local/apache/htdocs
</td></tr>
</table>

-- 
chris@jellybaby.net
From chris at jellybaby.net  Tue Aug 17 11:12:23 2004
From: chris at jellybaby.net (Chris Boulter)
Date: Tue Aug 17 11:12:25 2004
Subject: [Mailman-Developers] Timestamps in archive are +1 hr
Message-ID: <20040817091223.GD11013@jellybaby.net>

Apologies for noise, but I posted this to mailman-users last month and got
no replies. It doesn't seem like something which would be all that hard
to fix for someone who knows Python/Mailman better than I do. Any ideas?

----- Forwarded message from Chris Boulter <chris@jellybaby.net> -----

Date: Wed, 28 Jul 2004 15:30:35 +0100
From: Chris Boulter <chris@jellybaby.net>
Subject: [Mailman-Users] Timestamps in archive are +1 hr
To: mailman-users@python.org

Hi,

The timestamps on messages in our Mailman archives are all 1 hour ahead of
reality. Any ideas?

I'm in the UK, where it's currently summertime, which is UTC +0100. Typing
'date' on our Mailman box gives
        Wednesday July 28 15:24:33 BST 2004
which looks correct to me.

I've found that I can fix the time by changing i18n.py line 60 (in the
ctime function) from
        year, mon, day, hh, mm, ss, wday, yday, dst = time.localtime(date)
                                                           ^^^^^^^^^
to
        year, mon, day, hh, mm, ss, wday, yday, dst = time.gmtime(date)
                                                           ^^^^^^
and rebuilding the archives, but I don't want to leave this hack in place.

If it's useful to know, a test mail I sent at 1253 local time today had
its seconds-since-epoch set to 01091019325 by the time it got to the
archive.

Many thanks.

-- 
chris@jellybaby.net
------------------------------------------------------

----- End forwarded message -----

-- 
chris@jellybaby.net
From chris at cogdon.org  Tue Aug 17 18:16:03 2004
From: chris at cogdon.org (Chris Cogdon)
Date: Tue Aug 17 18:16:09 2004
Subject: [Mailman-Developers] Permission problem on CGIs reading config.pck
In-Reply-To: <20040817090917.GC11013@jellybaby.net>
References: <20040817090917.GC11013@jellybaby.net>
Message-ID: <BC93AAFB-F068-11D8-82FE-000A95E3823E@cogdon.org>


On Aug 17, 2004, at 02:09, Chris Boulter wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I'm getting an intermittent error with our (very non-standard) Mailman
> installation. Things are working fine in our (also non-standard)
> production installation, but not in development - so possibly I've 
> broken
> something with my most recent enhancements, or possibly the 
> installation
> is different.
>
> The error is:
>     Permission denied: '/usr/local/mailman/lists/accounting/config.pck'
>
> The file mentioned:
>     -rw-rw----   1 root     mailman     3678 Aug 16 09:00
>     /usr/local/mailman/lists/accounting/config.pck
>
> All config.pck files seem to have the same ownership on production
> as these, but the error is not occurring there.

[snip]

Hate to ask the obvious, but... did you run bin/check_perms ?


-- 
    ("`-/")_.-'"``-._        Chris Cogdon <chris@cogdon.org>
     . . `; -._    )-;-,_`)
    (v_,)'  _  )`-.\  ``-'
   _.- _..-_/ / ((.'
((,.-'   ((,/   fL

From somuchfun at atlantismail.com  Tue Aug 17 19:38:57 2004
From: somuchfun at atlantismail.com (Somuchfun)
Date: Tue Aug 17 20:02:25 2004
Subject: [Mailman-Developers] Personalization in header?
Message-ID: <E1Bx7vK-0000np-AR@gondor.westbay.net>


How can I add a line in the header that reflects the email address of the
poster of the message? It seems only the user (recipient) can be shown by a
variable?

thanks

From jwblist at olympus.net  Tue Aug 17 20:41:09 2004
From: jwblist at olympus.net (John W. Baxter)
Date: Tue Aug 17 20:41:19 2004
Subject: [Mailman-Developers] Timestamps in archive are +1 hr
In-Reply-To: <20040817091223.GD11013@jellybaby.net>
Message-ID: <BD479F55.1500C%jwblist@olympus.net>

Version of Mailman?  System on which you're running?

Assuming Linux, what is the third (last) line of
cat /etc/adjtime

I expect either LOCAL or UTC...our Mailman machine has UTC, and--which I had
never noticed--is an hour ahead on the From lines in the archive.  Hmmm.

Mailman 2.1.2; RedHat 9

  --John


On 8/17/2004 2:12, "Chris Boulter" <chris@jellybaby.net> wrote:

> Apologies for noise, but I posted this to mailman-users last month and got
> no replies. It doesn't seem like something which would be all that hard
> to fix for someone who knows Python/Mailman better than I do. Any ideas?
> 
> ----- Forwarded message from Chris Boulter <chris@jellybaby.net> -----
> 
> Date: Wed, 28 Jul 2004 15:30:35 +0100
> From: Chris Boulter <chris@jellybaby.net>
> Subject: [Mailman-Users] Timestamps in archive are +1 hr
> To: mailman-users@python.org
> 
> Hi,
> 
> The timestamps on messages in our Mailman archives are all 1 hour ahead of
> reality. Any ideas?
> 
> I'm in the UK, where it's currently summertime, which is UTC +0100. Typing
> 'date' on our Mailman box gives
>       Wednesday July 28 15:24:33 BST 2004
> which looks correct to me.
> 
> I've found that I can fix the time by changing i18n.py line 60 (in the
> ctime function) from
>       year, mon, day, hh, mm, ss, wday, yday, dst = time.localtime(date)
>                                                          ^^^^^^^^^
> to
>       year, mon, day, hh, mm, ss, wday, yday, dst = time.gmtime(date)
>                                                          ^^^^^^
> and rebuilding the archives, but I don't want to leave this hack in place.
> 
> If it's useful to know, a test mail I sent at 1253 local time today had
> its seconds-since-epoch set to 01091019325 by the time it got to the
> archive.
> 
> Many thanks.
From sal at deskforce.ltd.uk  Wed Aug 18 13:33:40 2004
From: sal at deskforce.ltd.uk (Salim Fadhley)
Date: Wed Aug 18 13:33:41 2004
Subject: [Mailman-Developers] Mailman as a component to my application,
	please advise
Message-ID: <48637.83.146.34.206.1092828820.squirrel@83.146.34.206>

I'm trying to build an application for work for which I hope to use
mailman as a component; Here is what I am trying to do, do please let me
know if you think this is sensible and if GNU Mailman is likely to be of
use. If you take the time to read this, I would like to say thanks in
advance.

I need a simple mailing list manager to help organize our time-sheeting
system. I already have a working Zope base application for doing
time-sheets. One of the things this application is capable of doing is
producing for any employee, on any given day a form to fill in so that the
employee can record their hours. It's a simple form made with formulator
that allows each employee to log the time they spent on a particular job.

Unfortunately employees often forget to fill in their timesheets which
mean the accountants forget to invoice and everybody looses out. So to
combat this, we came up with a simple idea; What if every employee listed
on the company Zope-based intranet were to receive an email at 4pm on any
working day containing the form they need to fill in.

Each form is unique to a user as not all users work on the same projects
or work the same hours. We cannot send the same form to everybody, we need
to:
a) Calculate a URL for each employee's form which will include the
employee's ID number from the intranet.
b) Fetch that URL and convert it into an email
c) Send that email to the employee and detect if there is a bounce.
d) If a bounce occurs then we need to add a flag to that user's record;
This will show up in the zope based intranet.

The idea is that since most employees use our Squirrelmail based webmail,
they can fill in the form through their webmail interface and submit their
timesheets back.

Requirements:
* The zope based intranet currently runs on Zope, MS-SQL server with the
commercial mxodbc drivers.
* If nececary, mailman can run on a Windows server - we have Gentoo and
Mandrake boxes that can accommodate this job.
* Wherever possible Python is the preferred programming language.
* Where possible I would like to avoid having to generate new code.
* The code will be released as per the terms of the GNU.

Notes:
* CPU power is not a problem; If this thing works then the accountants
will be happy to buy another Xeon (or two!).

Question:
* Can GNU Mailman help me with this project?
* Does GNU Mailman have the ability to fetch web-pages on a per individual
basis (rather than sending the same thing to each user).

-- 
Salim Fadhley
t. 07973 710 574
For the record, I consider any email sent to me to be my own property,
regardless of any request or disclaimer saying otherwise.
From chris at cogdon.org  Wed Aug 18 15:20:36 2004
From: chris at cogdon.org (Chris Cogdon)
Date: Wed Aug 18 15:20:43 2004
Subject: [Mailman-Developers] Mailman as a component to my application,
	please advise
In-Reply-To: <48637.83.146.34.206.1092828820.squirrel@83.146.34.206>
References: <48637.83.146.34.206.1092828820.squirrel@83.146.34.206>
Message-ID: <6455C250-F119-11D8-82FE-000A95E3823E@cogdon.org>


On Aug 18, 2004, at 04:33, Salim Fadhley wrote:

> I'm trying to build an application for work for which I hope to use
> mailman as a component; Here is what I am trying to do, do please let 
> me
> know if you think this is sensible and if GNU Mailman is likely to be 
> of
> use. If you take the time to read this, I would like to say thanks in
> advance.
>
> I need a simple mailing list manager to help organize our time-sheeting
> system. I already have a working Zope base application for doing
> time-sheets. One of the things this application is capable of doing is
> producing for any employee, on any given day a form to fill in so that 
> the
> employee can record their hours. It's a simple form made with 
> formulator
> that allows each employee to log the time they spent on a particular 
> job.
>
> Unfortunately employees often forget to fill in their timesheets which
> mean the accountants forget to invoice and everybody looses out. So to
> combat this, we came up with a simple idea; What if every employee 
> listed
> on the company Zope-based intranet were to receive an email at 4pm on 
> any
> working day containing the form they need to fill in.
>
> Each form is unique to a user as not all users work on the same 
> projects
> or work the same hours. We cannot send the same form to everybody, we 
> need
> to:
> a) Calculate a URL for each employee's form which will include the
> employee's ID number from the intranet.
> b) Fetch that URL and convert it into an email
> c) Send that email to the employee and detect if there is a bounce.
> d) If a bounce occurs then we need to add a flag to that user's record;
> This will show up in the zope based intranet.
>
> The idea is that since most employees use our Squirrelmail based 
> webmail,
> they can fill in the form through their webmail interface and submit 
> their
> timesheets back.
>
> Requirements:
> * The zope based intranet currently runs on Zope, MS-SQL server with 
> the
> commercial mxodbc drivers.
> * If nececary, mailman can run on a Windows server - we have Gentoo and
> Mandrake boxes that can accommodate this job.
> * Wherever possible Python is the preferred programming language.
> * Where possible I would like to avoid having to generate new code.
> * The code will be released as per the terms of the GNU.
>
> Notes:
> * CPU power is not a problem; If this thing works then the accountants
> will be happy to buy another Xeon (or two!).
>
> Question:
> * Can GNU Mailman help me with this project?
> * Does GNU Mailman have the ability to fetch web-pages on a per 
> individual
> basis (rather than sending the same thing to each user).

Honestly (and I could be corrected on this, of course) mailman is 
overkill for what you want to do. mailman's strength is managing the 
mailing list as automatically as possible (ie, people can sign up, 
remove themselves, get passwords and archives, all without bothering 
the administrator).

That doesn't sound like what you want to do. For starters, the 
recipients for all the mail are controlled by some kind of database 
criteria. For example: "extract all the names and email-addresses for 
all employees that have not submitted their time sheet this period". 
This is not something that mailman can do.

Furthermore, mailman can't give you the message customisability that 
you want.

INstead, I'd simply recommend building your messages, recipient by 
recipient, and using Python's 'smtplib' module to send the mail.

About the only thing mailman MIGHT be useful for is its bounce-message 
handling, but I suspect you wont get enough bounces to warrant the time 
required to hack around with Mailman to extract that part.

> For the record, I consider any email sent to me to be my own property,
> regardless of any request or disclaimer saying otherwise.

That's nice :) Given I haven't signed anything to the effect..... 
*grinwink*


-- 
    ("`-/")_.-'"``-._        Chris Cogdon <chris@cogdon.org>
     . . `; -._    )-;-,_`)
    (v_,)'  _  )`-.\  ``-'
   _.- _..-_/ / ((.'
((,.-'   ((,/   fL

From chris at jellybaby.net  Wed Aug 18 15:29:00 2004
From: chris at jellybaby.net (Chris Boulter)
Date: Wed Aug 18 15:29:15 2004
Subject: [Mailman-Developers] Timestamps in archive are +1 hr
In-Reply-To: <BD479F55.1500C%jwblist@olympus.net>
References: <20040817091223.GD11013@jellybaby.net>
	<BD479F55.1500C%jwblist@olympus.net>
Message-ID: <20040818132900.GJ8561@jellybaby.net>

On Tue 2004-08-17 11:41:09 -0700, John W. Baxter wrote:
> Version of Mailman?  System on which you're running?

Originally it was Mailman 2.1.2, but I've made extensive modifications,
especially to the archiving. In fact, it's entirely possible that I
introduced this anomaly in the timestamps.

> Assuming Linux, what is the third (last) line of
> cat /etc/adjtime

Solaris, I'm afraid. I'm not sure what the equivalent file is. The only
files whose names contain 'adjtime' are a couple of man pages.

mailmandeploy@pavo # uname -a
SunOS pavo 5.9 Generic_112233-12 sun4u sparc SUNW,UltraAX-i2

-- 
chris@jellybaby.net | +44 7951 979421
From chris at jellybaby.net  Wed Aug 18 15:56:54 2004
From: chris at jellybaby.net (Chris Boulter)
Date: Wed Aug 18 15:57:01 2004
Subject: [Mailman-Developers] Permission problem on CGIs reading config.pck
In-Reply-To: <BC93AAFB-F068-11D8-82FE-000A95E3823E@cogdon.org>
References: <20040817090917.GC11013@jellybaby.net>
	<BC93AAFB-F068-11D8-82FE-000A95E3823E@cogdon.org>
Message-ID: <20040818135654.GK8561@jellybaby.net>

On Tue 2004-08-17 09:16:03 -0700, Chris Cogdon wrote:
> 
> On Aug 17, 2004, at 02:09, Chris Boulter wrote:
> 
> >Hi,
> >
> >I'm getting an intermittent error with our (very non-standard) Mailman
> >installation. Things are working fine in our (also non-standard)
> >production installation, but not in development - so possibly I've 
> >broken
> >something with my most recent enhancements, or possibly the 
> >installation
> >is different.
> >
> >The error is:
> >    Permission denied: '/usr/local/mailman/lists/accounting/config.pck'
> >
> >The file mentioned:
> >    -rw-rw----   1 root     mailman     3678 Aug 16 09:00
> >    /usr/local/mailman/lists/accounting/config.pck
> >
> >All config.pck files seem to have the same ownership on production
> >as these, but the error is not occurring there.
> 
> [snip]
> 
> Hate to ask the obvious, but... did you run bin/check_perms ?

No, I forgot all about that script. I've just run it and fixed a load of
errors. Hopefully this will solve the problem. Thanks for asking the
obvious.

Chris

-- 
chris@jellybaby.net
From fred at bytesforall.org  Thu Aug 26 18:58:05 2004
From: fred at bytesforall.org (Frederick Noronha (FN))
Date: Thu Aug 26 20:07:59 2004
Subject: [Mailman-Developers] Debate about Mailman on BytesForAll
In-Reply-To: <20040818100041.824A41E4026@bag.python.org>
References: <20040818100041.824A41E4026@bag.python.org>
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.60.0408262226260.465@news.goa.bytesforall.org>

Hello from India:

I am a Free Software enthusiast and co-founder of BytesForAll.org

Recently, there was an interesting debate taking place on our discussion 
list, about Mailman 2.0 and future plans. Many are users of Mailman, and I 
would request those developers with the inclination to kindly check on the 
same at

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/bytesforall_readers

Regards, FN
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Frederick Noronha (FN)    Near Convent, SALIGAO 403511 GOA India
Freelance Journalist      Tel: +91-832-2409490 MOBILE: 9822122436
fred at bytesforall.org   fredericknoronha at vsnl.net
http://fn.swiki.net       (FN's swiki)
http://www.ilug-goa.tk    (GNULinux Users Group Goa)
From kmccann at bellanet.org  Thu Aug 26 20:38:47 2004
From: kmccann at bellanet.org (Kevin McCann)
Date: Thu Aug 26 20:38:56 2004
Subject: [Mailman-Developers] Debate about Mailman on BytesForAll
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.60.0408262226260.465@news.goa.bytesforall.org>
References: <20040818100041.824A41E4026@bag.python.org>
	<Pine.LNX.4.60.0408262226260.465@news.goa.bytesforall.org>
Message-ID: <412E2E37.4060202@bellanet.org>

Frederick Noronha (FN) wrote:

> Hello from India:
>
> I am a Free Software enthusiast and co-founder of BytesForAll.org
>
> Recently, there was an interesting debate taking place on our 
> discussion list, about Mailman 2.0 and future plans. Many are users of 
> Mailman, and I would request those developers with the inclination to 
> kindly check on the same at
>
> http://groups.yahoo.com/group/bytesforall_readers


Of course, from my point of view, the discussion is really about Mailman 
3.0 and future plans.  ;-)  

To give context (seeing how I originally posted to bytes4all, not to 
mailman-developers), we (Bellanet and other orgs) are working on a 
project which is essentially an Open Sourcification of a service we run 
called Dgroups (www.dgroups.org). Dgroups is similar in many ways to 
YahooGroups, but without the noisy ads. Unfortunately, it is based on 
proprietary components - Lyris/MS SQL/ColdFusion.

Many of you on this list might recall discussions we had last year about 
the SQL-ability of Mailman. Many of you know that I have been lobbying 
for this for a very, very long time. I was quite happy when Barry 
started warming up to this in late 2003, early 2004. And we really made 
some headway at the developers sprint in March, as it became clear that 
Maki, Dale, myself and Barry were all very keen on a Mailman 3 that 
would support SQL data storage. Making Mailman 3 much more modular was 
certainly one of the other many goals.

The debate happening on bytes4all seems to be whether or not pushing for 
a SQL-able Mailman (ala Mailman 3) is the way to go or whether it is 
better to try to hack something together with Mailman 2 now, despite its 
problems:  pickle file storage, Pipermail archives, one-to-one 
list/member relationship, etc. I say "nay" to Mailman 2 and instead 
support the advancement of Mailman 3. Our organization, along with 
another funder, has earmarked significant funds for the Mailman 3 effort 
and look forward to sicing a few developers on Barry! 

So, there's a bit of context for those of you who are interested in the 
"debate."

Best,
Kevin
From barry at python.org  Thu Aug 26 20:52:04 2004
From: barry at python.org (Barry Warsaw)
Date: Thu Aug 26 20:52:09 2004
Subject: [Mailman-Developers] Debate about Mailman on BytesForAll
In-Reply-To: <412E2E37.4060202@bellanet.org>
References: <20040818100041.824A41E4026@bag.python.org>
	<Pine.LNX.4.60.0408262226260.465@news.goa.bytesforall.org>
	<412E2E37.4060202@bellanet.org>
Message-ID: <1093546324.9126.31.camel@geddy.wooz.org>

On Thu, 2004-08-26 at 14:38, Kevin McCann wrote:

> Of course, from my point of view, the discussion is really about Mailman 
> 3.0 and future plans.  ;-)  

And I must apologize for being so totally incommunicado these last few
weeks.  We have a very major release due at the end of next week so I've
been completely absorbed by that.  Things should calm down after that
and I plan on spending a lot of time on Mailman 3 this fall.

-Barry

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From kmccann at bellanet.org  Thu Aug 26 21:00:46 2004
From: kmccann at bellanet.org (Kevin McCann)
Date: Thu Aug 26 21:00:54 2004
Subject: [Mailman-Developers] Debate about Mailman on BytesForAll
In-Reply-To: <1093546324.9126.31.camel@geddy.wooz.org>
References: <20040818100041.824A41E4026@bag.python.org>	
	<Pine.LNX.4.60.0408262226260.465@news.goa.bytesforall.org>	
	<412E2E37.4060202@bellanet.org>
	<1093546324.9126.31.camel@geddy.wooz.org>
Message-ID: <412E335E.7000503@bellanet.org>

Barry Warsaw wrote:

>On Thu, 2004-08-26 at 14:38, Kevin McCann wrote:
>
>  
>
>>Of course, from my point of view, the discussion is really about Mailman 
>>3.0 and future plans.  ;-)  
>>    
>>
>
>And I must apologize for being so totally incommunicado these last few
>weeks.  We have a very major release due at the end of next week so I've
>been completely absorbed by that.  Things should calm down after that
>and I plan on spending a lot of time on Mailman 3 this fall.
>  
>

That's great news, Barry.  As you know, we're completely behind you and 
will do whatever we can from our end (people and money) to help a 
SQL-able MM3 become a reality. We'll be in touch.

Cheers,
Kevin
From barry at python.org  Thu Aug 26 22:01:37 2004
From: barry at python.org (Barry Warsaw)
Date: Thu Aug 26 22:01:40 2004
Subject: [Mailman-Developers] Debate about Mailman on BytesForAll
In-Reply-To: <412E335E.7000503@bellanet.org>
References: <20040818100041.824A41E4026@bag.python.org>
	<Pine.LNX.4.60.0408262226260.465@news.goa.bytesforall.org>
	<412E2E37.4060202@bellanet.org>
	<1093546324.9126.31.camel@geddy.wooz.org>
	<412E335E.7000503@bellanet.org>
Message-ID: <1093550497.9126.103.camel@geddy.wooz.org>

On Thu, 2004-08-26 at 15:00, Kevin McCann wrote:

> That's great news, Barry.  As you know, we're completely behind you and 
> will do whatever we can from our end (people and money) to help a 
> SQL-able MM3 become a reality. We'll be in touch.

While we're at it, let me mention in passing that I've been doing a lot
of work lately with SQLite.  I've been thinking that, what with all the
problems associated with BerkeleyDB, it might not make sense to switch
to SQLite as the embedded, default database for MM3.  I think it would
allow us to re-use a lot of the code, since it would be mostly DBAPI 2
compatible.

Thoughts?
-Barry

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From Dale at Newfield.org  Thu Aug 26 22:10:05 2004
From: Dale at Newfield.org (Dale Newfield)
Date: Thu Aug 26 22:10:08 2004
Subject: [Mailman-Developers] Debate about Mailman on BytesForAll
In-Reply-To: <1093550497.9126.103.camel@geddy.wooz.org>
References: <20040818100041.824A41E4026@bag.python.org>
	<Pine.LNX.4.60.0408262226260.465@news.goa.bytesforall.org>
	<412E2E37.4060202@bellanet.org>
	<1093546324.9126.31.camel@geddy.wooz.org>
	<412E335E.7000503@bellanet.org>
	<1093550497.9126.103.camel@geddy.wooz.org>
Message-ID: <Pine.OSX.4.58.0408261607020.20399@bambi-newfield-org.local>

On Thu, 26 Aug 2004, Barry Warsaw wrote:
> I've been thinking that, what with all the problems associated with
> BerkeleyDB, it might not make sense to switch to SQLite as the embedded,
> default database for MM3.

The biggest problem with BerkeleyDB is that it REQUIRES that the file
system support memory mapping the files.  This means that you cannot
guarantee correctness if these files are located on an NFS mount.

http://www.sleepycat.com/docs/ref/env/remote.html

-Dale
From kmccann at bellanet.org  Thu Aug 26 22:13:34 2004
From: kmccann at bellanet.org (Kevin McCann)
Date: Thu Aug 26 22:11:16 2004
Subject: [Mailman-Developers] Debate about Mailman on BytesForAll
In-Reply-To: <1093550497.9126.103.camel@geddy.wooz.org>
References: <20040818100041.824A41E4026@bag.python.org>	
	<Pine.LNX.4.60.0408262226260.465@news.goa.bytesforall.org>	
	<412E2E37.4060202@bellanet.org>
	<1093546324.9126.31.camel@geddy.wooz.org>	
	<412E335E.7000503@bellanet.org>
	<1093550497.9126.103.camel@geddy.wooz.org>
Message-ID: <412E446E.4090101@bellanet.org>

Barry Warsaw wrote:

>On Thu, 2004-08-26 at 15:00, Kevin McCann wrote:
>
>  
>
>>That's great news, Barry.  As you know, we're completely behind you and 
>>will do whatever we can from our end (people and money) to help a 
>>SQL-able MM3 become a reality. We'll be in touch.
>>    
>>
>
>While we're at it, let me mention in passing that I've been doing a lot
>of work lately with SQLite.  I've been thinking that, what with all the
>problems associated with BerkeleyDB, it might not make sense to switch
>to SQLite as the embedded, default database for MM3.  I think it would
>allow us to re-use a lot of the code, since it would be mostly DBAPI 2
>compatible.
>  
>

Might not make sense? Or might make sense?  I have played with SQLite a 
bit but not extensively, so I'm not aware of any major drawbacks. I do 
recall at the sprint lunch that SQLite was suggested by that fellow who 
was doing the email sprinting (can't remember his name, but he seemd to 
be a sharp cookie). SQLite, if it's solid, is attractive to me because 
it's built into PHP 5. Thinking down the road, it starts to look pretty 
good.

- Kevin


From claw at kanga.nu  Thu Aug 26 22:16:54 2004
From: claw at kanga.nu (J C Lawrence)
Date: Thu Aug 26 22:16:58 2004
Subject: [Mailman-Developers] Debate about Mailman on BytesForAll 
In-Reply-To: Message from Dale Newfield <Dale@Newfield.org> of "Thu,
	26 Aug 2004 16:10:05 EDT."
	<Pine.OSX.4.58.0408261607020.20399@bambi-newfield-org.local> 
References: <20040818100041.824A41E4026@bag.python.org>
	<Pine.LNX.4.60.0408262226260.465@news.goa.bytesforall.org>
	<412E2E37.4060202@bellanet.org>
	<1093546324.9126.31.camel@geddy.wooz.org>
	<412E335E.7000503@bellanet.org>
	<1093550497.9126.103.camel@geddy.wooz.org>
	<Pine.OSX.4.58.0408261607020.20399@bambi-newfield-org.local> 
Message-ID: <16350.1093551414@kanga.nu>

On Thu, 26 Aug 2004 16:10:05 -0400 (EDT) 
Dale Newfield <Dale@Newfield.org> wrote:
> On Thu, 26 Aug 2004, Barry Warsaw wrote:

> This means that you cannot guarantee correctness if these files are
> located on an NFS mount.

Actually you can't guarantee that anyway.  Without NFS v4 file locks are
unenforceable and still advisory.  Ditto AFS and a large host of others.

-- 
J C Lawrence
---------(*)                Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas.
claw@kanga.nu               He lived as a devil, eh?
http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/  Evil is a name of a foeman, as I live.
From brad at stop.mail-abuse.org  Thu Aug 26 22:46:11 2004
From: brad at stop.mail-abuse.org (Brad Knowles)
Date: Thu Aug 26 22:46:23 2004
Subject: [RETRANSMIT] Re: [Mailman-Developers] Debate about
	Mailman on BytesForAll
In-Reply-To: <1093550497.9126.103.camel@geddy.wooz.org>
References: <20040818100041.824A41E4026@bag.python.org>
	<Pine.LNX.4.60.0408262226260.465@news.goa.bytesforall.org>
	<412E2E37.4060202@bellanet.org>
	<1093546324.9126.31.camel@geddy.wooz.org>
	<412E335E.7000503@bellanet.org>
	<1093550497.9126.103.camel@geddy.wooz.org>
Message-ID: <p06002053bd53f4fff7a0@[10.0.1.3]>

At 4:01 PM -0400 2004-08-26, Barry Warsaw wrote:

>                               I've been thinking that, what with all the
>  problems associated with BerkeleyDB, it might not make sense to switch
>  to SQLite as the embedded, default database for MM3.

	Problems with BerkeleyDB?  Can you elaborate?

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad@stop.mail-abuse.org>

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

     -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
     Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755

   SAGE member since 1995.  See <http://www.sage.org/> for more info.
From brad at stop.mail-abuse.org  Thu Aug 26 22:46:27 2004
From: brad at stop.mail-abuse.org (Brad Knowles)
Date: Thu Aug 26 22:46:24 2004
Subject: [RETRANSMIT] Re: [Mailman-Developers] Debate about
	Mailman on BytesForAll
In-Reply-To: <Pine.OSX.4.58.0408261607020.20399@bambi-newfield-org.local>
References: <20040818100041.824A41E4026@bag.python.org>
	<Pine.LNX.4.60.0408262226260.465@news.goa.bytesforall.org>
	<412E2E37.4060202@bellanet.org>
	<1093546324.9126.31.camel@geddy.wooz.org>
	<412E335E.7000503@bellanet.org>
	<1093550497.9126.103.camel@geddy.wooz.org>
	<Pine.OSX.4.58.0408261607020.20399@bambi-newfield-org.local>
Message-ID: <p06002057bd53fa7d411e@[10.0.1.3]>

At 4:10 PM -0400 2004-08-26, Dale Newfield wrote:

>  The biggest problem with BerkeleyDB is that it REQUIRES that the file
>  system support memory mapping the files.  This means that you cannot
>  guarantee correctness if these files are located on an NFS mount.

	True enough.  That's a known issue with BerkeleyDB.

	But why would you be putting any of this stuff on NFS anyway? 
And how would you deal with all the file locking issues?  And 
cross-platform issues?  I've been doing NFS for a very long time, and 
I have yet to see a mail-related environment where NFS is a good 
choice or works well.  Given the sorts of things we're talking about 
doing, I can't imagine that NFS could possibly be a good solution.

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad@stop.mail-abuse.org>

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

     -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
     Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755

   SAGE member since 1995.  See <http://www.sage.org/> for more info.
From Dale at Newfield.org  Thu Aug 26 22:47:16 2004
From: Dale at Newfield.org (Dale Newfield)
Date: Thu Aug 26 22:47:19 2004
Subject: [Mailman-Developers] Debate about Mailman on BytesForAll
In-Reply-To: <p06002057bd53fa7d411e@[10.0.1.3]>
References: <20040818100041.824A41E4026@bag.python.org>
	<Pine.LNX.4.60.0408262226260.465@news.goa.bytesforall.org>
	<412E2E37.4060202@bellanet.org>
	<1093546324.9126.31.camel@geddy.wooz.org>
	<412E335E.7000503@bellanet.org>
	<1093550497.9126.103.camel@geddy.wooz.org>
	<Pine.OSX.4.58.0408261607020.20399@bambi-newfield-org.local>
	<p06002057bd53fa7d411e@[10.0.1.3]>
Message-ID: <Pine.OSX.4.58.0408261642550.20399@bambi-newfield-org.local>

On Thu, 26 Aug 2004, Brad Knowles wrote:
> Given the sorts of things we're talking about doing, I can't imagine
> that NFS could possibly be a good solution.

I don't contest that conclusion.  I do worry, though, that mailman may
often times get used by people that don't know enough to realize that.
While it's reasonable to expect that deployment to run slowly, I don't
think it's reasonable to expect that deployment to randomly break.

Do we have "DON'T use on AFS/NFS" warnings in prominent enough places to
prevent that type of deployment from happening?

-Dale
From brad at stop.mail-abuse.org  Thu Aug 26 22:53:10 2004
From: brad at stop.mail-abuse.org (Brad Knowles)
Date: Thu Aug 26 22:53:11 2004
Subject: [Mailman-Developers] Debate about Mailman on
 BytesForAll
In-Reply-To: <Pine.OSX.4.58.0408261642550.20399@bambi-newfield-org.local>
References: <20040818100041.824A41E4026@bag.python.org>
	<Pine.LNX.4.60.0408262226260.465@news.goa.bytesforall.org>
	<412E2E37.4060202@bellanet.org>
	<1093546324.9126.31.camel@geddy.wooz.org>
	<412E335E.7000503@bellanet.org>
	<1093550497.9126.103.camel@geddy.wooz.org>
	<Pine.OSX.4.58.0408261607020.20399@bambi-newfield-org.local>
	<p06002057bd53fa7d411e@[10.0.1.3]>
	<Pine.OSX.4.58.0408261642550.20399@bambi-newfield-org.local>
Message-ID: <p06002058bd53fd61ee97@[10.0.1.3]>

At 4:47 PM -0400 2004-08-26, Dale Newfield wrote:

>  Do we have "DON'T use on AFS/NFS" warnings in prominent enough places to
>  prevent that type of deployment from happening?

	I must confess that I didn't know that we were making any use of 
BerkeleyDB.  However, I would have recommended that we use it as an 
alternative to the Python pickle format, if we weren't already using 
it.


	Except for the mmap()/NFS issue, IMO BerkeleyDB is the fastest, 
most robust, open source database solution around.  No, it's not SQL. 
But it is the key technology differentiator between MySQL and MaxSQL, 
and is what allows MaxSQL to finally satisfy all of the ACID criteria.

	But it's not SQL.

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad@stop.mail-abuse.org>

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

     -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
     Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755

   SAGE member since 1995.  See <http://www.sage.org/> for more info.
From kmccann at bellanet.org  Thu Aug 26 22:57:55 2004
From: kmccann at bellanet.org (Kevin McCann)
Date: Thu Aug 26 22:55:38 2004
Subject: [RETRANSMIT] Re: [Mailman-Developers] Debate about	Mailman on
	BytesForAll
In-Reply-To: <p06002057bd53fa7d411e@[10.0.1.3]>
References: <20040818100041.824A41E4026@bag.python.org>	<Pine.LNX.4.60.0408262226260.465@news.goa.bytesforall.org>	<412E2E37.4060202@bellanet.org>	<1093546324.9126.31.camel@geddy.wooz.org>	<412E335E.7000503@bellanet.org>	<1093550497.9126.103.camel@geddy.wooz.org>	<Pine.OSX.4.58.0408261607020.20399@bambi-newfield-org.local>
	<p06002057bd53fa7d411e@[10.0.1.3]>
Message-ID: <412E4ED3.5030903@bellanet.org>

Brad Knowles wrote:

> At 4:10 PM -0400 2004-08-26, Dale Newfield wrote:
>
>>  The biggest problem with BerkeleyDB is that it REQUIRES that the file
>>  system support memory mapping the files.  This means that you cannot
>>  guarantee correctness if these files are located on an NFS mount.
>
>
>     True enough.  That's a known issue with BerkeleyDB.
>
>     But why would you be putting any of this stuff on NFS anyway? And 
> how would you deal with all the file locking issues?  And 
> cross-platform issues?  I've been doing NFS for a very long time, and 
> I have yet to see a mail-related environment where NFS is a good 
> choice or works well.  Given the sorts of things we're talking about 
> doing, I can't imagine that NFS could possibly be a good solution.
>

I agree, Brad.

Barry has redirected some of the discussion over to 
mailman3-dev@python.org. I'll crosspost for this message, but maybe we 
should move over to mm3-dev? In any event, further to NFS, it seems 
SQLite has issues, too. From the concurrency article I pointed to:

"SQLite uses POSIX advisory locks to implement locking on Unix. On 
windows it uses the LockFile(), LockFileEx(), and UnlockFile() system 
calls. SQLite assumes that these system calls all work as advertised. If 
that is not the case, then database corruption can result. One should 
note that POSIX advisory locking is known to be buggy or even 
unimplemented on many NFS implementations (including recent versions of 
Mac OS X) and that there are reports of locking problems for network 
filesystems under windows. Your best defense is to not use SQLite for 
files on a network filesystem."

- Kevin








From brad at stop.mail-abuse.org  Thu Aug 26 23:02:42 2004
From: brad at stop.mail-abuse.org (Brad Knowles)
Date: Thu Aug 26 23:02:38 2004
Subject: [RETRANSMIT] Re: [Mailman-Developers] Debate about
	Mailman on 	BytesForAll
In-Reply-To: <412E4ED3.5030903@bellanet.org>
References: <20040818100041.824A41E4026@bag.python.org>
	<Pine.LNX.4.60.0408262226260.465@news.goa.bytesforall.org>
	<412E2E37.4060202@bellanet.org>
	<1093546324.9126.31.camel@geddy.wooz.org>
	<412E335E.7000503@bellanet.org>
	<1093550497.9126.103.camel@geddy.wooz.org>
	<Pine.OSX.4.58.0408261607020.20399@bambi-newfield-org.local>
	<p06002057bd53fa7d411e@[10.0.1.3]> <412E4ED3.5030903@bellanet.org>
Message-ID: <p06002059bd53ffb17961@[10.0.1.3]>

At 4:57 PM -0400 2004-08-26, Kevin McCann wrote:

>  Barry has redirected some of the discussion over to
>  mailman3-dev@python.org. I'll crosspost for this message, but maybe we
>  should move over to mm3-dev?

	I'm not really a developer, but I'll subscribe to it anyway since 
I do feel there might be some architectural issues on which I might 
have some useful advice.

>  Your best defense is to not use SQLite for files on a network filesystem."

	Fair enough.  Are we looking for something where use on a network 
filesystem is an issue?

	Or do we care more about other issues, such as performance (where 
I think BerkeleyDB would probably win), or interface methods/language 
(where SQL might be preferred)?

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad@stop.mail-abuse.org>

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

     -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
     Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755

   SAGE member since 1995.  See <http://www.sage.org/> for more info.
From rmg at terc.edu  Thu Aug 26 23:10:03 2004
From: rmg at terc.edu (Robby Griffin)
Date: Thu Aug 26 23:10:53 2004
Subject: [Mailman-Developers] Debate about Mailman on BytesForAll
In-Reply-To: <Pine.OSX.4.58.0408261642550.20399@bambi-newfield-org.local>
Message-ID: <4C69E7B8-F7A4-11D8-AA22-00039383CAAE@terc.edu>

On Thursday, Aug 26, 2004, at 16:47 US/Eastern, Dale Newfield wrote:

> Do we have "DON'T use on AFS/NFS" warnings in prominent enough places 
> to
> prevent that type of deployment from happening?

I would say no. From INSTALL:

- If you plan on running your MTA and web server on different
   machines, sharing Mailman installations via NFS, be sure that
   the clocks on those two machines are synchronized closely.

Not that Mailman 3 has an install document yet, but there is plenty of 
stuff in 2.x that seems geared toward this kind of use. I can recall at 
least one instance of hearing from someone on the list using NFS to 
split up MTA and webserver.

	--Robby

From claw at kanga.nu  Thu Aug 26 23:16:09 2004
From: claw at kanga.nu (J C Lawrence)
Date: Thu Aug 26 23:16:14 2004
Subject: [Mailman3-dev] Re: [RETRANSMIT] Re: [Mailman-Developers] Debate
	about Mailman on BytesForAll 
In-Reply-To: Message from Kevin McCann <kmccann@bellanet.org> 
	of "Thu, 26 Aug 2004 16:57:55 EDT." <412E4ED3.5030903@bellanet.org> 
References: <20040818100041.824A41E4026@bag.python.org>
	<Pine.LNX.4.60.0408262226260.465@news.goa.bytesforall.org>
	<412E2E37.4060202@bellanet.org>
	<1093546324.9126.31.camel@geddy.wooz.org>
	<412E335E.7000503@bellanet.org>
	<1093550497.9126.103.camel@geddy.wooz.org>
	<Pine.OSX.4.58.0408261607020.20399@bambi-newfield-org.local>
	<p06002057bd53fa7d411e@[10.0.1.3]> <412E4ED3.5030903@bellanet.org> 
Message-ID: <21267.1093554969@kanga.nu>

On Thu, 26 Aug 2004 16:57:55 -0400 
Kevin McCann <kmccann@bellanet.org> wrote:

> "SQLite uses POSIX advisory locks to implement locking on Unix. On
> windows it uses the LockFile(), LockFileEx(), and UnlockFile() system
> calls. SQLite assumes that these system calls all work as
> advertised. If that is not the case, then database corruption can
> result. One should note that POSIX advisory locking is known to be
> buggy or even unimplemented on many NFS implementations (including
> recent versions of Mac OS X) and that there are reports of locking
> problems for network filesystems under windows. Your best defense is
> to not use SQLite for files on a network filesystem."

I've spent some time mucking about in this area and it is a minefield.
Very simply, throwing out all of the messy details, there is only one
operation which is atomic under the network filesystems: creat (2).  The
exceptions where creat(2) is not guaranteed atomic are for some of the
more obscure cacheing network filesystes which attempt to be resilient
across intermittent/bad connectivity and node failures.  If you want to
account for those filesystems as well then sorry, there's just no
guaranteed correct locking methodology.

Yes, it is that bad.

-- 
J C Lawrence
---------(*)                Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas.
claw@kanga.nu               He lived as a devil, eh?
http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/  Evil is a name of a foeman, as I live.
From miranda at uranus.com  Thu Aug 26 23:33:18 2004
From: miranda at uranus.com (Michael Chang)
Date: Thu Aug 26 23:33:28 2004
Subject: [Mailman-Developers] Debate about Mailman on BytesForAll: LDAP
	support?
In-Reply-To: <412E335E.7000503@bellanet.org>
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.44.0408261730400.16864-100000@ion.uranus.com>


On Thu, 26 Aug 2004, Kevin McCann wrote:

|> Barry Warsaw wrote:
|> 
|> >On Thu, 2004-08-26 at 14:38, Kevin McCann wrote:
|> >
|> >>Of course, from my point of view, the discussion is really about Mailman 
|> >>3.0 and future plans.  ;-)  
|> >
|> >And I must apologize for being so totally incommunicado these last few
|> >weeks.  We have a very major release due at the end of next week so I've
|> >been completely absorbed by that.  Things should calm down after that
|> >and I plan on spending a lot of time on Mailman 3 this fall.
|> 
|> That's great news, Barry.  As you know, we're completely behind you and 
|> will do whatever we can from our end (people and money) to help a 
|> SQL-able MM3 become a reality. We'll be in touch.

<call-from-the-coke-stand>
 And don't forget LDAP support, either!
</call-from-the-coke-stand>

Michael

|> _______________________________________________
|> Mailman-Developers mailing list
|> Mailman-Developers@python.org
|> http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-developers
|> Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-developers/miranda%40uranus.com

From barry at python.org  Thu Aug 26 23:56:37 2004
From: barry at python.org (Barry Warsaw)
Date: Thu Aug 26 23:56:41 2004
Subject: [Mailman-Developers] Debate about Mailman on BytesForAll
In-Reply-To: <p06002053bd53f4fff7a0@[10.0.1.3]>
References: <20040818100041.824A41E4026@bag.python.org>
	<Pine.LNX.4.60.0408262226260.465@news.goa.bytesforall.org>
	<412E2E37.4060202@bellanet.org>
	<1093546324.9126.31.camel@geddy.wooz.org>
	<412E335E.7000503@bellanet.org>
	<1093550497.9126.103.camel@geddy.wooz.org>
	<p06002053bd53f4fff7a0@[10.0.1.3]>
Message-ID: <1093557397.9125.167.camel@geddy.wooz.org>

On Thu, 2004-08-26 at 16:14, Brad Knowles wrote:

> 	Problems with BerkeleyDB?  Can you elaborate?

Briefly: 

- Installation and compatibility problems.  Lots of hoops to go through
to get compatible versions of libdb, the bsddb module, etc. all working
together.

- Verbosity/complexity/uniqueness of API.  Okay, SQL is icky but at
least it's a shared common ickiness. ;)  The actual DBAPI2 interface is
pretty simple and I don't think Mailman's SQL needs are much more
complex than some inserts and selects with maybe a join here and there. 
bsddb's API is huge and complicated.

- Uncertainty of stability.  IME Berkeley has been pretty stable, but I
still hear lots of tails, gossip, voodoo, whatever about stability of
the underlying database.

- For an embedded database, it still has a fairly high administrative
overhead.  My primary goal for default database is that it be drop dead
simple to administer.  BerkeleyDB in transactional mode is anything
but.  It's also complex to configure and tune.

On the plus side, most *nix OSes either come with libdb or can get them
pretty easily, and Python 2.3/2.4 (yes, MM3 will likely require Python
2.4 when available) comes with support out of the box.  OTOH, I've
always found it extremely simple to install SQLite.

-Barry

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From barry at python.org  Fri Aug 27 00:02:16 2004
From: barry at python.org (Barry Warsaw)
Date: Fri Aug 27 00:02:19 2004
Subject: [Mailman-Developers] Debate about Mailman on BytesForAll
In-Reply-To: <p06002058bd53fd61ee97@[10.0.1.3]>
References: <20040818100041.824A41E4026@bag.python.org>
	<Pine.LNX.4.60.0408262226260.465@news.goa.bytesforall.org>
	<412E2E37.4060202@bellanet.org>
	<1093546324.9126.31.camel@geddy.wooz.org>
	<412E335E.7000503@bellanet.org>
	<1093550497.9126.103.camel@geddy.wooz.org>
	<Pine.OSX.4.58.0408261607020.20399@bambi-newfield-org.local>
	<p06002057bd53fa7d411e@[10.0.1.3]>
	<Pine.OSX.4.58.0408261642550.20399@bambi-newfield-org.local>
	<p06002058bd53fd61ee97@[10.0.1.3]>
Message-ID: <1093557736.9120.173.camel@geddy.wooz.org>

On Thu, 2004-08-26 at 16:53, Brad Knowles wrote:

> 	I must confess that I didn't know that we were making any use of 
> BerkeleyDB.  However, I would have recommended that we use it as an 
> alternative to the Python pickle format, if we weren't already using 
> it.

Only in MM3, with experimental, unsupported MemberAPI backend for MM2. 
Definitely nothing official.

> 	Except for the mmap()/NFS issue, IMO BerkeleyDB is the fastest, 
> most robust, open source database solution around.  No, it's not SQL. 
> But it is the key technology differentiator between MySQL and MaxSQL, 
> and is what allows MaxSQL to finally satisfy all of the ACID criteria.
> 
> 	But it's not SQL.

It is a requirement that a BerkeleyDB backend be possible for MM3.  

However, it is not a requirement that such a backend be the default, and
highest possible performance from the default configuration is not as
important to me as simplicity of use.  So far, SQLite wins on that
count.  All this would mean is that I would be personally responsible
for the SQLite backend.  I would do everything possible to help
facilitate community contribution of a BerkeleyDB backend, and I would
include it in the standard distro as long as there were volunteers to
maintain it.

-Barry

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From brad at stop.mail-abuse.org  Fri Aug 27 00:12:38 2004
From: brad at stop.mail-abuse.org (Brad Knowles)
Date: Fri Aug 27 00:58:39 2004
Subject: [Mailman3-dev] Re: [RETRANSMIT] Re:
	[Mailman-Developers] Debate 	about Mailman on BytesForAll
In-Reply-To: <21267.1093554969@kanga.nu>
References: <20040818100041.824A41E4026@bag.python.org>
	<Pine.LNX.4.60.0408262226260.465@news.goa.bytesforall.org>
	<412E2E37.4060202@bellanet.org>
	<1093546324.9126.31.camel@geddy.wooz.org>
	<412E335E.7000503@bellanet.org>
	<1093550497.9126.103.camel@geddy.wooz.org>
	<Pine.OSX.4.58.0408261607020.20399@bambi-newfield-org.local>
	<p06002057bd53fa7d411e@[10.0.1.3]>
	<412E4ED3.5030903@bellanet.org> <21267.1093554969@kanga.nu>
Message-ID: <p0600205abd5410796840@[10.0.1.3]>

At 5:16 PM -0400 2004-08-26, J C Lawrence wrote:

>  I've spent some time mucking about in this area and it is a minefield.
>  Very simply, throwing out all of the messy details, there is only one
>  operation which is atomic under the network filesystems: creat (2).

	Which is why Nick Christensen built the Earthlink mail system 
around this feature.  See 
<http://www.jetcafe.org/~npc/doc/mail_arch.html>.

	But I don't see how we can build all of Mailman around the same feature.

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad@stop.mail-abuse.org>

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

     -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
     Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755

   SAGE member since 1995.  See <http://www.sage.org/> for more info.
From adam.boettiger at pobox.com  Mon Aug 30 18:39:03 2004
From: adam.boettiger at pobox.com (Adam Boettiger)
Date: Mon Aug 30 18:39:09 2004
Subject: [Mailman-Developers] Min requirements for running Mailman?
Message-ID: <41335827.2030200@pobox.com>

Apologies in advance for this basic of a question but this is
technical in nature and thus doesn't seem appropriate for the
users or list owners lists.

Is there a listing somewhere for the minimum requirements or
recommended config for running Mailman WRT machine, ram etc.

My specific question is if it is possible to run it on a VPS such
as http://www.linode.com/ ?

If yes, this seems a more cost-effective alternative to paying
for a dedicated box.

Thoughts?

AB

From brad at stop.mail-abuse.org  Mon Aug 30 19:03:49 2004
From: brad at stop.mail-abuse.org (Brad Knowles)
Date: Mon Aug 30 19:04:22 2004
Subject: [Mailman-Developers] Min requirements for running
 Mailman?
In-Reply-To: <41335827.2030200@pobox.com>
References: <41335827.2030200@pobox.com>
Message-ID: <p0600208dbd590d5b4bdb@[10.0.1.3]>

At 9:39 AM -0700 2004-08-30, Adam Boettiger wrote:

>  Is there a listing somewhere for the minimum requirements or
>  recommended config for running Mailman WRT machine, ram etc.

	Not that I know of, no.  Everything depends on how many 
subscribers you will have, how those subscribers are distributed (are 
they all on one server, or are they spread amongst multiple servers), 
what kind of traffic you foresee (i.e., lots of large attachments or 
short text-only messages), how many messages per day you anticipate, 
whether or not you enable VERP, etc....

	For a small list, a Compaq Armada 4131T with a 133MHz Pentium-1 
processor, 48MB of RAM, and a 1GB hard drive, should be sufficient.

>  My specific question is if it is possible to run it on a VPS such
>  as http://www.linode.com/ ?

	VPS?  You mean a virtual server system such as provided by 
VMWare, or Xen, or jail() under FreeBSD?

	Technically, yes -- it should theoretically work.  But there are 
always slightly little strangeness things that could always interfere 
with that kind of operation.


	The only way to know for sure would be to try it out and see what happens.

>  If yes, this seems a more cost-effective alternative to paying
>  for a dedicated box.

	It might work for you, or it might not.  It's going to be 
difficult to tell unless you try it out, and I would imagine it would 
probably be pretty much impossible for anyone else to give you any 
really strong guidance on this matter unless you can give us a lot 
more details of what you've got planned.

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad@stop.mail-abuse.org>

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

     -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
     Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755

   SAGE member since 1995.  See <http://www.sage.org/> for more info.
From ianb at colorstudy.com  Mon Aug 30 19:10:30 2004
From: ianb at colorstudy.com (Ian Bicking)
Date: Mon Aug 30 19:11:34 2004
Subject: [Mailman-Developers] Min requirements for running Mailman?
In-Reply-To: <41335827.2030200@pobox.com>
References: <41335827.2030200@pobox.com>
Message-ID: <41335F86.3080108@colorstudy.com>

Adam Boettiger wrote:
> Apologies in advance for this basic of a question but this is
> technical in nature and thus doesn't seem appropriate for the
> users or list owners lists.
> 
> Is there a listing somewhere for the minimum requirements or
> recommended config for running Mailman WRT machine, ram etc.
> 
> My specific question is if it is possible to run it on a VPS such
> as http://www.linode.com/ ?

Sure.  I'm not sure what Mailman's minimum requirements are, but a VPS 
will certainly satisfy them.  I have Mailman running in a VPS. 
Obviously, depending on your usage, you may have problems.  But I'd 
actually suspect not -- you can use swap to keep from running out of 
memory, and Mailman's disk usage is reasonable (not counting archives). 
There's no real minimum CPU speed.  And actually, Mailman will work 
fairly well with a modest CPU, since it queues its work -- a VPS will 
typically have a fair amount of CPU available to it, but at any one 
moment it may not (depending on what the other VPSs are doing).  If you 
have a lot of traffic, I would only expect the lists to get slower, not 
for Mailman to fail in any catastrophic way.  Of course, YMMV.

-- 
Ian Bicking  /  ianb@colorstudy.com  /  http://blog.ianbicking.org
From mjinks at uchicago.edu  Tue Aug 31 01:39:03 2004
From: mjinks at uchicago.edu (mjinks@uchicago.edu)
Date: Tue Aug 31 01:40:00 2004
Subject: [Mailman-Developers] 2.0.14 -> 2.1.5 and pending requests
Message-ID: <20040830233903.GP11055@uchicago.edu>

Hi, all.  Just checking to see that I have this right before I expend a
lot of energy cleaning up what I think is a pretty big mess...

Our story so far: we have a list server that was running for years on
Mailman 1.0-rc2, and my mission is to get it up to date.  A couple of
weeks ago, acting on advice from someone on this list (might have been
Barry, actually), we took the system up to the last release of the 2.0
series I could find, which was 2.0.14.  Went okay, mostly.  Now I'd
like to make the jump to the latest.

In testing, bin/update seems to gag on any list with anything in a
request.pck file, like so:

...
Updating mailing list: [whichever]
Updating the held requests database.
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/mnt/http-new/opt/pkgs/mailman-2.1.5/bin/update", line 780, in ?
    errors = main()
  File "/mnt/http-new/opt/pkgs/mailman-2.1.5/bin/update", line 670, in
main
    errors = errors + dolist(listname)
  File "/mnt/http-new/opt/pkgs/mailman-2.1.5/bin/update", line 222, in
dolist
    mlist._UpdateRecords()
  File "/mnt/http-new/opt/pkgs/mailman-2.1.5/Mailman/ListAdmin.py", line
533, in _UpdateRecords
    for id, (op, info) in self.__db.items():
ValueError: unpack tuple of wrong size
...


At that point update dies, leaving the named list locked.  So far, lists
with nothing in their request databases seem to get a successful
upgrade.  Lists left locked by the last run are skipped, so we get a
little further each time until I clean up the lock files.

I went a-googling, and didn't find anything that looked like a reference
to this exact problem, but did find this in response to a different
upgrade issue, by Terri Oda in Mailman-Developers on July 30:

	If I recall correctly, Mailman still doesn't always deal gracefully
	with old pending stuff, so you may have to clear out those files
	before doing the upgrade

Ugh: we have, at last count, 2,459 lists.  Many are inactive and could
probably be culled, but even so, there's no way I could go through all
those request files by hand during an acceptable amount of downtime.
Even if I could, they're not my lists; I can't make decisions for the
list owners about administrative requests for their lists, and there's
no way I'll be able to get all the list owners to clean out their
requests without more flowing in.  So if we really do have to have all
the request files empty before an upgrade, there's no way we'll be able
to upgrade.

Have I confused myself?  Is there a better way?

We're running python 2.3.4 on Solaris 9/UltraSPARC.

Thanks,
-j

-- 
Michael Jinks, ENSA, ENSS, VDN, NSIT, The University of Chicago, world
"If the future's not bright, it's colorful." -- Einsturzende Neubauten
From adam.boettiger at pobox.com  Tue Aug 31 04:05:21 2004
From: adam.boettiger at pobox.com (Adam Boettiger)
Date: Tue Aug 31 04:05:27 2004
Subject: [Mailman-Developers] Min requirements for running Mailman?
In-Reply-To: <41335F86.3080108@colorstudy.com>
References: <41335827.2030200@pobox.com> <41335F86.3080108@colorstudy.com>
Message-ID: <4133DCE1.90509@pobox.com>

Ian Bicking wrote:
> Sure.  I'm not sure what Mailman's minimum requirements are, but a VPS 
> will certainly satisfy them. 

Of the following, is there a distribution that plays better with 
Mailman than any of the others? :)

CentOS 3.1
Debian 3.0r1
Fedora Core 1
Gentoo Linux 2004-06-29
Mandrake 9.1
Red Hat 8.0
Red Hat 9.0
Slackware 10
Slackware 9.0

From terri at zone12.com  Tue Aug 31 04:42:04 2004
From: terri at zone12.com (Terri Oda)
Date: Tue Aug 31 04:42:00 2004
Subject: [Mailman-Developers] 2.0.14 -> 2.1.5 and pending requests
In-Reply-To: <20040830233903.GP11055@uchicago.edu>
References: <20040830233903.GP11055@uchicago.edu>
Message-ID: <57B53200-FAF7-11D8-86EC-000D934FBF38@zone12.com>

On Aug 30, 2004, at 7:39 PM, mjinks@uchicago.edu wrote:
> Ugh: we have, at last count, 2,459 lists.  Many are inactive and could
> probably be culled, but even so, there's no way I could go through all
> those request files by hand during an acceptable amount of downtime.
> Even if I could, they're not my lists; I can't make decisions for the
> list owners about administrative requests for their lists, and there's
> no way I'll be able to get all the list owners to clean out their
> requests without more flowing in.  So if we really do have to have all
> the request files empty before an upgrade, there's no way we'll be able
> to upgrade.

Well, the alternative is to write (or commission someone else to write) 
the conversion script... I just don't think one's been written yet.  
(And I'd be happy to be proven wrong on this.)

What you'd need to do is find out what data's stored in your current 
request pickles (.pck files), find out what data is stores in the newer 
pickles, and convert from one to the other, using default values for 
any additional fields (eg: the "real name" field which has been added 
to the user subscription requests).

Using python, it should be easy enough to unpickle the requests and see 
what's in them, and it shouldn't actually be that hard to build new 
request pickles from the old.  The only real problem is that getting it 
all right is likely to be time-consuming work.  (Which is why it's 
easier for many people to just clear the queues.)  I'd guess it'd take 
maybe a couple of days for someone who didn't mind sifting through the 
source and the pickles to see what's what.

So... how's your python? 
  

From brad at stop.mail-abuse.org  Tue Aug 31 10:00:03 2004
From: brad at stop.mail-abuse.org (Brad Knowles)
Date: Tue Aug 31 10:15:49 2004
Subject: [Mailman-Developers] Min requirements for running
 Mailman?
In-Reply-To: <4133DCE1.90509@pobox.com>
References: <41335827.2030200@pobox.com>
	<41335F86.3080108@colorstudy.com> <4133DCE1.90509@pobox.com>
Message-ID: <p06002094bd59debd20dd@[10.0.1.3]>

At 7:05 PM -0700 2004-08-30, Adam Boettiger wrote:

>  Of the following, is there a distribution that plays better with Mailman
>  than any of the others? :)
>
>  CentOS 3.1
>  Debian 3.0r1
>  Fedora Core 1
>  Gentoo Linux 2004-06-29
>  Mandrake 9.1
>  Red Hat 8.0
>  Red Hat 9.0
>  Slackware 10
>  Slackware 9.0

	Well, if you check the archives and the FAQ, in the past Red Hat 
and Red Hat derived distributions have had certain known problems 
with the RPMs that they have made available, but I don't know about 
the current RPMs.  Given their past history, my view is that you 
might want to try to avoid them if you can.

	Within python.org itself, the preferred Linux distribution so far 
has been Debian, although I don't know if all machines run Linux.

	Can't speak for any of the others.  I don't have any personal 
experience with any of them.

	Myself, I prefer FreeBSD, but then I know that OS choice is a 
very personal matter.


	For example, within python.org, OS choice for the machines has a 
lot to do with where the system is physically located and who is 
going to be primarily responsible for going on-site and doing things 
to the machine at the console, if something should seriously break, 
and what the personal preferences are of that person/team.

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad@stop.mail-abuse.org>

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

     -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
     Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755

   SAGE member since 1995.  See <http://www.sage.org/> for more info.
From Nigel.Metheringham at dev.intechnology.co.uk  Tue Aug 31 11:00:58 2004
From: Nigel.Metheringham at dev.intechnology.co.uk (Nigel Metheringham)
Date: Tue Aug 31 11:01:04 2004
Subject: [Mailman-Developers] Min requirements for running Mailman?
In-Reply-To: <p06002094bd59debd20dd@[10.0.1.3]>
References: <41335827.2030200@pobox.com> <41335F86.3080108@colorstudy.com>
	<4133DCE1.90509@pobox.com>  <p06002094bd59debd20dd@[10.0.1.3]>
Message-ID: <1093942858.3698.16.camel@angua.localnet>

On Tue, 2004-08-31 at 10:00 +0200, Brad Knowles wrote:
> At 7:05 PM -0700 2004-08-30, Adam Boettiger wrote:
> 	Well, if you check the archives and the FAQ, in the past Red Hat 
> and Red Hat derived distributions have had certain known problems 
> with the RPMs that they have made available, but I don't know about 
> the current RPMs.  Given their past history, my view is that you 
> might want to try to avoid them if you can.

I'd tend to take this as:-
      * Mailman is a bitch to package
      * RH have packaged it for a while
      * RH found a good few of the gotchas in packaging Mailman
      * RH have subsequently learnt from their mistakes and recently
        have produced good packages.
      * Other distros may do better, or may yet have to learn from their
        mistakes :-)

Just for the record, the errata FC1 packages, and all the FC2 packages
worked fine for me.  However I don't run Mailman on production on FC*
(due to the machine provided by Cambridge Uni for exim.org running
FreeBSD).


> 	Myself, I prefer FreeBSD, but then I know that OS choice is a 
> very personal matter.

Heh - transferring to FreeBSD has been very much a learning experience.
Best to ask me in a year what I think of it :-)

	Nigel.
-- 
[ Nigel Metheringham           Nigel.Metheringham@InTechnology.co.uk ]
[ - Comments in this message are my own and not ITO opinion/policy - ]


From brad at stop.mail-abuse.org  Tue Aug 31 15:32:53 2004
From: brad at stop.mail-abuse.org (Brad Knowles)
Date: Tue Aug 31 15:33:10 2004
Subject: [Mailman-Developers] Min requirements for running
 Mailman?
In-Reply-To: <41335827.2030200@pobox.com>
References: <41335827.2030200@pobox.com>
Message-ID: <p0600209abd5a2e46c50b@[10.0.1.3]>

At 9:39 AM -0700 2004-08-30, Adam Boettiger wrote:

>  Apologies in advance for this basic of a question but this is
>  technical in nature and thus doesn't seem appropriate for the
>  users or list owners lists.

	BTW, I'd like to thank you for your good questions.  This will 
make excellent fodder for the FAQ, and I'm surprised that it wasn't 
already there.

	I'll try to get these two items into the FAQ tonight, if someone 
else doesn't beat me to it.

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad@stop.mail-abuse.org>

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

     -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
     Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755

   SAGE member since 1995.  See <http://www.sage.org/> for more info.
From adam.boettiger at pobox.com  Tue Aug 31 16:30:26 2004
From: adam.boettiger at pobox.com (Adam Boettiger)
Date: Tue Aug 31 16:30:32 2004
Subject: [Mailman-Developers] Min requirements for running Mailman?
In-Reply-To: <p0600209abd5a2e46c50b@[10.0.1.3]>
References: <41335827.2030200@pobox.com> <p0600209abd5a2e46c50b@[10.0.1.3]>
Message-ID: <41348B82.1060507@pobox.com>

Brad Knowles wrote:
>     BTW, I'd like to thank you for your good questions.  This will make 
> excellent fodder for the FAQ, and I'm surprised that it wasn't already 
> there.

Brad - No worries.  Happy to be the guinea pig. ;)

Here's something else you may want to add as I'm sure I'm not the 
only one in this situation...

I was looking for something that would allow me to run Mailman 
and learn as I go about the install process and tweaking it. I 
didn't want to pay the $99 to $250 for a dedicated box (overkill 
for what I want to do with it).

What I found was Linode http://www.linode.com/, where they offer 
VPS accounts that you can configure from scratch with one or more 
boots of five flavors of Linux.  Well documented forums.  Email 
form support that is responsive. Root access and the ability to 
make all the mistakes I want to for (and this is the best part) 
the starting price of $19.95 per month...

It's like being able to ride a cheap bike with training wheels to 
learn before moving to a dedicated box (if that is even needed 
for small work).

In any case, a great thing to add to the FAQ I think as many I 
imagine are learning and it's better to learn cheaply than to 
have to invest a ton of money.

HTH

AB
From jdennis at redhat.com  Tue Aug 31 16:45:37 2004
From: jdennis at redhat.com (John Dennis)
Date: Tue Aug 31 16:47:37 2004
Subject: [Mailman-Developers] Min requirements for running Mailman?
In-Reply-To: <p06002094bd59debd20dd@[10.0.1.3]>
References: <41335827.2030200@pobox.com> <41335F86.3080108@colorstudy.com>
	<4133DCE1.90509@pobox.com>  <p06002094bd59debd20dd@[10.0.1.3]>
Message-ID: <1093963537.348.10.camel@finch.boston.redhat.com>

On Tue, 2004-08-31 at 04:00, Brad Knowles wrote:
> 	Well, if you check the archives and the FAQ, in the past Red Hat 
> and Red Hat derived distributions have had certain known problems 
> with the RPMs that they have made available, but I don't know about 
> the current RPMs.  Given their past history, my view is that you 
> might want to try to avoid them if you can.

To the best of my knowledge the problems were addressed and there are
many satisfied users. We did ship a package with an install problem, but
then again bugs happen, its the nature of software. I'm not sure it's
fair for you to maintain a mailman FAQ entry denigrating Red Hat or
reiterate that view in the mailing list for a past mistake, may we apply
for forgiveness?
-- 
John Dennis <jdennis@redhat.com>

From terri at zone12.com  Tue Aug 31 18:19:29 2004
From: terri at zone12.com (Terri Oda)
Date: Tue Aug 31 18:19:25 2004
Subject: [Mailman-Developers] Min requirements for running Mailman?
In-Reply-To: <1093942858.3698.16.camel@angua.localnet>
References: <41335827.2030200@pobox.com> <41335F86.3080108@colorstudy.com>
	<4133DCE1.90509@pobox.com> <p06002094bd59debd20dd@[10.0.1.3]>
	<1093942858.3698.16.camel@angua.localnet>
Message-ID: <88F61797-FB69-11D8-86EC-000D934FBF38@zone12.com>

On Aug 31, 2004, at 5:00 AM, Nigel Metheringham wrote:
> I'd tend to take this as:-
>       * Mailman is a bitch to package
>       * RH have packaged it for a while
>       * RH found a good few of the gotchas in packaging Mailman
>       * RH have subsequently learnt from their mistakes and recently
>         have produced good packages.
>       * Other distros may do better, or may yet have to learn from 
> their
>         mistakes :-)

I believe point number one there says it all. :)

Also, if you're concerned about packaging, you might want to consider 
doing it from source.  It's really not very hard -- Mailman generally 
upgrades easily if you're not going between major revisions.

I've been running it from source on Red Hat, Debian and FreeBSD 
machines for many years now without too many gotchas.  The only one 
that comes to mind was an oddity with the HTML to plaintext conversion 
on our older red hat machine, but it's a really easy fix in the config 
file.

  Terri

From claw at kanga.nu  Tue Aug 31 20:32:17 2004
From: claw at kanga.nu (J C Lawrence)
Date: Tue Aug 31 20:32:20 2004
Subject: [Mailman-Developers] Min requirements for running Mailman? 
In-Reply-To: Message from Terri Oda <terri@zone12.com> of "Tue,
	31 Aug 2004 12:19:29 EDT."
	<88F61797-FB69-11D8-86EC-000D934FBF38@zone12.com> 
References: <41335827.2030200@pobox.com> <41335F86.3080108@colorstudy.com>
	<4133DCE1.90509@pobox.com> <p06002094bd59debd20dd@[10.0.1.3]>
	<1093942858.3698.16.camel@angua.localnet>
	<88F61797-FB69-11D8-86EC-000D934FBF38@zone12.com> 
Message-ID: <15405.1093977137@kanga.nu>

On Tue, 31 Aug 2004 12:19:29 -0400 
Terri Oda <terri@zone12.com> wrote:
> On Aug 31, 2004, at 5:00 AM, Nigel Metheringham wrote:

>> Mailman is a bitch to package 

> I believe point number one there says it all. :)

Many python applications are a bitch to package, especially if you also
want to maintain a reasonable level of FHS conformance.

> I've been running it from source on Red Hat, Debian and FreeBSD
> machines for many years now without too many gotchas.  

I've been well pleased with the Debian packages over the last 5 years.

-- 
J C Lawrence
---------(*)                Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas.
claw@kanga.nu               He lived as a devil, eh?
http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/  Evil is a name of a foeman, as I live.
From brad at stop.mail-abuse.org  Tue Aug 31 20:06:05 2004
From: brad at stop.mail-abuse.org (Brad Knowles)
Date: Tue Aug 31 20:38:09 2004
Subject: [Mailman-Developers] Min requirements for running
 Mailman?
In-Reply-To: <1093963537.348.10.camel@finch.boston.redhat.com>
References: <41335827.2030200@pobox.com>
	<41335F86.3080108@colorstudy.com>	 <4133DCE1.90509@pobox.com> 
	<p06002094bd59debd20dd@[10.0.1.3]>
	<1093963537.348.10.camel@finch.boston.redhat.com>
Message-ID: <p0600209cbd5a6e6dce3f@[10.0.1.3]>

At 10:45 AM -0400 2004-08-31, John Dennis wrote:

>  To the best of my knowledge the problems were addressed and there are
>  many satisfied users. We did ship a package with an install problem, but
>  then again bugs happen, its the nature of software. I'm not sure it's
>  fair for you to maintain a mailman FAQ entry denigrating Red Hat or
>  reiterate that view in the mailing list for a past mistake, may we apply
>  for forgiveness?

	Fair enough.  Would you agree that it's fair to warn people about 
older versions, however?

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad@stop.mail-abuse.org>

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

     -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
     Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755

   SAGE member since 1995.  See <http://www.sage.org/> for more info.
From jdennis at redhat.com  Tue Aug 31 21:06:43 2004
From: jdennis at redhat.com (John Dennis)
Date: Tue Aug 31 21:07:19 2004
Subject: [Mailman-Developers] Min requirements for running Mailman?
In-Reply-To: <p0600209cbd5a6e6dce3f@[10.0.1.3]>
References: <41335827.2030200@pobox.com> <41335F86.3080108@colorstudy.com>
	<4133DCE1.90509@pobox.com>  <p06002094bd59debd20dd@[10.0.1.3]>
	<1093963537.348.10.camel@finch.boston.redhat.com>
	<p0600209cbd5a6e6dce3f@[10.0.1.3]>
Message-ID: <1093979203.348.83.camel@finch.boston.redhat.com>

On Tue, 2004-08-31 at 14:06, Brad Knowles wrote:
> At 10:45 AM -0400 2004-08-31, John Dennis wrote:
> 
> >  To the best of my knowledge the problems were addressed and there are
> >  many satisfied users. We did ship a package with an install problem, but
> >  then again bugs happen, its the nature of software. I'm not sure it's
> >  fair for you to maintain a mailman FAQ entry denigrating Red Hat or
> >  reiterate that view in the mailing list for a past mistake, may we apply
> >  for forgiveness?
> 
> 	Fair enough.  Would you agree that it's fair to warn people about 
> older versions, however?

Of course. The right thing is to communicate the issue so people know
how to resolve any problems they encounter, thats the purpose and spirit
of a FAQ.

-- 
John Dennis <jdennis@redhat.com>

From adam.boettiger at pobox.com  Tue Aug 31 21:18:18 2004
From: adam.boettiger at pobox.com (Adam Boettiger)
Date: Tue Aug 31 21:18:48 2004
Subject: [Mailman-Developers] Addition to FAQ re: List of available
	customization fields
Message-ID: <4134CEFA.8000002@pobox.com>

I've read both FAQ's and used the FAQ Search Tool and it came up 
empty, so this is something else you may want to add to the FAQ:

I see that you can insert customized fields into outgoing 
messages by using the <MM-Field-Name> tag. Where can I find a 
list of all field names available for insertion in this tag?

AB
From terri at zone12.com  Tue Aug 31 21:27:37 2004
From: terri at zone12.com (Terri Oda)
Date: Tue Aug 31 21:27:33 2004
Subject: [Mailman-Developers] Addition to FAQ re: List of available
	customization fields
In-Reply-To: <4134CEFA.8000002@pobox.com>
References: <4134CEFA.8000002@pobox.com>
Message-ID: <D16610D4-FB83-11D8-86EC-000D934FBF38@zone12.com>


On Aug 31, 2004, at 3:18 PM, Adam Boettiger wrote:

> I've read both FAQ's and used the FAQ Search Tool and it came up 
> empty, so this is something else you may want to add to the FAQ:
>
> I see that you can insert customized fields into outgoing messages by 
> using the <MM-Field-Name> tag. Where can I find a list of all field 
> names available for insertion in this tag?

Shockingly enough, you find this in the documentation. ;)  Con't feel 
bad that you didn't see it, though -- this is from the unfinished 
list-admin manual.  Which I am, incidentally, working on, although I 
think I checked my last changes into the wrong repository...

Anyhow, here it is.  I'll go put it in the FAQ.

real_name
     This is the value of the real_name configuration variable
     in the General options category.

list_name
     This is the canonical name of the mailing list.  In other words
     it's the posting address of the list.

	Note: For backward compatibility, the variable _internal_name is
     equivalent.

host_name
     This is the domain name part of the email address for this list.

web_page_url
     This is the base url for contacting the list via the web.  It can
     be appended with listinfo%(list_name)s to yield the
     general list information page for the mailing list.

description
     The brief description of the mailing list.

info
     This is the full description of the mailing list.

cgiext
     This is the extension added to CGI scripts.  It might be the empty
     string, .cgi, or something else depending on how your site
     is configured.

From terri at zone12.com  Tue Aug 31 21:41:19 2004
From: terri at zone12.com (Terri Oda)
Date: Tue Aug 31 21:41:14 2004
Subject: [Mailman-Developers] Addition to FAQ re: List of available
	customization fields
In-Reply-To: <D16610D4-FB83-11D8-86EC-000D934FBF38@zone12.com>
References: <4134CEFA.8000002@pobox.com>
	<D16610D4-FB83-11D8-86EC-000D934FBF38@zone12.com>
Message-ID: <BB37D8E1-FB85-11D8-86EC-000D934FBF38@zone12.com>

Forgot to mention: I think there are also at least one verp-specific 
variable that I didn't list, but I don't have time to search for 'em 
right now.  If someone knows what those variables are, please add them 
to the FAQ entry too:

http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py?req=show&file=faq03.041.htp

  Terri

From chris at schoeppi.net  Tue Aug 31 22:30:02 2004
From: chris at schoeppi.net (Christian Schoepplein)
Date: Tue Aug 31 22:30:23 2004
Subject: [Mailman-Developers] Addition to FAQ re: List of available
	customization fields
In-Reply-To: <D16610D4-FB83-11D8-86EC-000D934FBF38@zone12.com>
References: <4134CEFA.8000002@pobox.com>
	<D16610D4-FB83-11D8-86EC-000D934FBF38@zone12.com>
Message-ID: <20040831203002.GB2759@athlon.schoeppi.net>

Hi!

On Di, Aug 31, 2004 at 03:27:37 -0400, Terri Oda wrote:
> On Aug 31, 2004, at 3:18 PM, Adam Boettiger wrote:
> 
> >I've read both FAQ's and used the FAQ Search Tool and it came up 
> >empty, so this is something else you may want to add to the FAQ:
> >
> >I see that you can insert customized fields into outgoing messages by 
> >using the <MM-Field-Name> tag. Where can I find a list of all field 
> >names available for insertion in this tag?
> 
> Shockingly enough, you find this in the documentation. ;)  Con't feel 
> bad that you didn't see it, though -- this is from the unfinished 
> list-admin manual.  Which I am, incidentally, working on, although I 
> think I checked my last changes into the wrong repository...
> 
> Anyhow, here it is.  I'll go put it in the FAQ.
> 
> real_name
>     This is the value of the real_name configuration variable
>     in the General options category.
> 
> list_name
>     This is the canonical name of the mailing list.  In other words
>     it's the posting address of the list.
> 
> 	Note: For backward compatibility, the variable _internal_name is
>     equivalent.
> 
> host_name
>     This is the domain name part of the email address for this list.
> 
> web_page_url
>     This is the base url for contacting the list via the web.  It can
>     be appended with listinfo%(list_name)s to yield the
>     general list information page for the mailing list.
> 
> description
>     The brief description of the mailing list.
> 
> info
>     This is the full description of the mailing list.
> 
> cgiext
>     This is the extension added to CGI scripts.  It might be the empty
>     string, .cgi, or something else depending on how your site
>     is configured.

As mensioned a view minutes ago in the mailman-users list, not in evry 
template file evry format string works :-(. The problem seems to be in 
the

$mailmanpath/Mailman/MailList.py

file. Some format strings aren't set up as a property for every template 
file :-(.

It would be nice for future releases, if evry ofthen used format string 
could be used in evry template file.

Ciao,
Schoeppi

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