[Mailman-Users] Backing up Mailman list installations
Barry A. Warsaw
barry at zope.com
Thu Nov 29 17:14:03 CET 2001
>>>>> "GW" == Greg Ward <gward at mems-exchange.org> writes:
GW> Mailman ".db" files, despite the name, are *not* Berkeley DB
GW> files. They are Python marshall files. (In Mailman 2.1, they
GW> will be called ".pck" and become Python pickle files.)
GW> In any event, I'm pretty sure they are platform independent.
Correct. They are platform independent.
Note that Python marshals are not guaranteed to be compatible across
Python releases, although in practice I don't think we've ever broken
this, at least for the data types that Mailman stores. However, this
was one of the factors for moving to Python pickles in Mailman 2.1,
which /are/ guaranteed to be compatible across Python versions,
platforms, endian-ness, etc. etc.
You may still want human readable versions of the database files
though, for other reasons. It's not a priority of mine to provide
that, but it wouldn't be hard to write, e.g. a pickle <-> XML
conversion tool. Contributions are welcome <wink>.
-Barry
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