[Mailman-Users] Yet Another List Cloning Question

[Mark Sapiro]

Jon Forrest wrote:
>
>Here's what isn't clear to me. In looking at the contents
>of oldlistname.cfg I see lots of good stuff. Some of it is obviously
>specific to oldlistname, and some of it is generic list
>configuration info. Is there any way I, as a new Mailman,
>can tell which is which? For example, it looks like everything after
>'subject_prefix' can be generic but I'm not sure.


It depends :-)

For example, things like welcome_message and goodbye_msg may or may not
be list specific, but if they are empty in your standard config, then
they could be left in or omitted with the same effect for a new list.

Likewise, things from Privacy options are probably list specific, but
are likely empty.

Note that the things in your config_list -o output are just the
settings from the web admin pages together with their 'help text'
except for Passwords and Membership Management...



>Also, am I right in thinking that a better way of doing this,
>once I've created a correct std.cfg, would be to put the stuff
>from std.cfg into mm_cfg.py?


Yes, but you can't do this directly. You may already understand this,
but in case you don't, if you put

anonymous_list = True

in mm_cfg.py, it wouldn't result in an error, but it effectivly
wouldn't do anything. However, if you look in Defaults.py, you will see

DEFAULT_ANONYMOUS_LIST = No

which defines the default setting for the anonymous_list attribute for
new lists.  So, yes it is appropriate to look through Defaults.py for
all the defaults for new lists and override in mm_cfg.py those that
you want to be different.

Note however, that you can't make up settings for mm_cfg.py. For
example if you wanted all new lists to have a non-empty ban_list, you
can't do this by setting DEFAULT_BAN_LIST in mm_cfg.py because there
is no such setting and even if you set it, Mailman won't look at it.
You can only override Defaults.py settings in mm_cfg.py; you can't
create new ones.

-- 
Mark Sapiro <msapiro at value.net>       The highway is for gamblers,
San Francisco Bay Area, California    better use your sense - B. Dylan