[Mailman-Users] Backing up Mailman list installations

[Thomas T. Veldhouse]

> Mailman ".db" files, despite the name, are *not* Berkeley DB files.
> They are Python marshall files.  (In Mailman 2.1, they will be called
> ".pck" and become Python pickle files.)
>
> In any event, I'm pretty sure they are platform independent.

If that is the case, then are these files portable between Python
implementations and versions?  I had a horrible problem moving a mailman
2.0.2 using Python 1.52 on FreeBSD to Mailman 2.0.3 using Python 1.6 on
Linux (2.2) about one year ago.  The files could NOT be read by mailman.  I
was forced to add all the users to the new list by hand and thus reset all
the passwords and settings for each user (most unhappy about that).  It was
also a bit of a pain to get the archives working again so that users could
browse them on the web.

>
> Also, since when are Berkeley DB files platform-dependent?

I am not an expert with them -- I avoid them in favor of true RDBMS.  I was
under and assumption that they were in platform specific binary files
(though the file layout maybe the same on each platform, byte ordering could
make a difference).

Tom Veldhouse
veldy at veldy.net

>
>         Greg