[Mailman-Users] Header Info on monthly password reminders

[Greg Ward]

On 01 August 2001, Rich Ramos said:
> Why do the monthly mailings get sent from the admin of the first list that 
> got created after mailman was installed rather than the global mailman 
> admin?

A few minutes digging through the source (specifically,
cron/mailpasswds and Mailman/Utils.py) explains the mechanism.

It looks like this is what happens: cron/mailpasswds loops over all
lists on the system until it finds an advertised one.  The list of all
lists is supplied by Mailman.Utils.list_names(), which simply returns
the list of directories in ~mailman/lists/.  This is done with Python's
os.listdir() function, which goes by the physical order in the
filesystem.

In other words, it might as well be random, but I'm not surprised that
it consistently uses the first list created on some systems.  It's a
crapshoot.

What I can't explain is *why* the mailpasswds script works this way.  It
seems dumb, for the reasons you and Sarah have discovered and explained.
It's probably just a cheap shortcut for getting access to the code that
delivers messages "from a list".

        Greg
-- 
Greg Ward - software developer                gward at mems-exchange.org
MEMS Exchange                            http://www.mems-exchange.org