[Mailman-Users] RELEASED Mailman 2.0.10

[Barry A. Warsaw]

>>>>> "MTV" == Mark T Valites <valites at geneseo.edu> writes:

    MTV> When did the race condition occour?

Mailman uses a clever naming scheme to make sure that a partially
written incoming message isn't processed by the qrunner.  It has to do
this because two separate processes are writing the incoming messages
and reading the same messages for processing.  Pretty typical system
design stuff.

The race condition in 2.0.8 occurred because of a disagreement in
which file name extension between the reader and the writer.  The race
could -- very occasionally -- cause email to get lost.  Chuq gave a
very nice explanation of why this happens, and why it's so rare; see
the mailman-developers archives for details.

So 2.0.9 fixes this race condition by making sure the reader and
writer agree on the naming convention being used.  But it had a small
bug in the name lookup routine which would cause spurious error
messages in the log file.  2.0.9 won't lose email because of this bug,
which is why the upgrade to 2.0.10 isn't a critical patch.  You'll
just get some useless errors in the error log, with about the same
(in)frequency as the race condition in 2.0.8.

-Barry