[Mailman-Users] Importing large archives ... design limit hit, and possible bug

[Marc MERLIN]

On Sat, Jun 01, 2002 at 09:35:38PM -0400, Scott Courtney wrote:
> Hi, folks
> 
> I think I have found a bug in bin/arch, but I imagine someone has found it
> before. Also, I have run into an architectural limit and would like to
> change a constant to fix it, if possible.
 
As you found out, there are some issues with bin/arch
 
> This works, though it is cumbersome and slow.
> 
> I'm not a Python guru but do  know C. I'm running on a machine with *lots*
> of RAM. Can someone point me to which module  I need to edit so that I can
> increase the  constant for an  array size  somewhere such that  this thing
> will handle more than 80 messages? I figure  if I know where to look I can
> puzzle out the code enough to make  a simple change like that. But it will
> take days to find it in code of an unfamiliar language with many modules.

It's not a constant, but arch has issues in some cases with some messages.
I haven't run it recently on a full mailbox, but it does chew a *lot* of
ram, and at least used to die on some messages.

> I'll make this proposal: Someone point me in the right direction to solve
> this thing. When I've got it working, I'll write an entry to submit for the
> FAQ to document this for the next person, as a way of contributing to the
> Mailman user community.
 
Unfortunately, I haven't played with that code, and few people have. It's
there, but it's pretty much unmaintained.
 
> I did some investigation and have found that the problem occurs when a normal
> text line in the body of a message happens to begin with the string "From ".
> It appears bin/arch is not being very smart about recognizing the beginning
> of a new message. I think what is needed is to add a more detailed parsing
> regexp to the code that determines where one message ends and another begins.
 
That's true. You should probably run ~mailman/bin/cleanarch on the mailbox
first. I'm not sure why that functionality isn't rolled inside arch

BTW, I'm talking about mailman 2.1b2.
Mailman 2.0  is another can  of worms, and arch  will probably not  be fixed
further.
 
Marc
-- 
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Microsoft is to operating systems & security ....
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