[Mailman-Users] Archiving failure

[Dan Mick]

tim at maths.tcd.ie wrote:
> 
> Our mailman system (running under FreeBSD) states (untruly) that every archives is empty,
> because -- I think -- it fails to write out the required index.html files.
> 
> We get this (repeatedly) in ~mailman/logs/error
> 
> ===============================================
> Oct 28 15:40:07 2000 (47279) Archive file access failure:
>         /local/lib/mailman/archives/private/sf.mbox/sf.mbox (0, 'Error')
> Oct 28 15:40:07 2000 (47279) Delivery exception: (0, 'Error')
> Oct 28 15:40:07 2000 (47279) Traceback (innermost last):
>   File "/local/lib/mailman/Mailman/Handlers/HandlerAPI.py", line 82, in do_pipeline
>     func(mlist, msg, msgdata)
>   File "/local/lib/mailman/Mailman/Handlers/ToArchive.py", line 47, in process
>     mlist.ArchiveMail(msg, msgdata)
>   File "/local/lib/mailman/Mailman/Archiver/Archiver.py", line 189, in ArchiveMail
>     self.__archive_to_mbox(msg)
>   File "/local/lib/mailman/Mailman/Archiver/Archiver.py", line 160, in __archive_to_mbox
>     mbox.AppendMessage(post)
>   File "/local/lib/mailman/Mailman/Mailbox.py", line 41, in AppendMessage
>     self.fp.seek(-1, 2)
> IOError: (0, 'Error')
> ===============================================

Error number 0?  That's an odd one...any way of using, what is it, ktrace,
to find out what that seek call is really returning to Python?
 
> Looking at ~mailman/Mailman/Mailbox.py the offending line
> seems to be the seek(-1,2) in the following,
> which appears to be an (odd) way of testing if the file is empty.

Well, I think it's a way of seeking the file backward one character; iff it
fails, the file must have been empty.
 
> ===============================================
>     # msg should be an rfc822 message or a subclass.
>     def AppendMessage(self, msg):
>         # Check the last character of the file and write a newline if it isn't
>         # a newline (but not at the beginning of an empty file.
>         try:
>             self.fp.seek(-1, 2)
>         except IOError, e:
>             if e.errno <> errno.EINVAL: raise
>             # the file must be empty

This is an out-of-date version of Mailbox.py; upgrade to RC1.  The issue's
been resolved.

>         else:
>             if self.fp.read(1) <> '\n':
>                 self.fp.write('\n')
>         # seek to the last char of the mailbox
>         self.fp.seek(1, 2)
> ===============================================
> 
> I don't know anything about python --
> maybe appearing in logs/error is not that bad?
> 
> Any suggestions of advice gratefully received.
> 
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