[Mailman-Users] Digest options -> list configuration

[Alan.Rubin at nt.gov.au]

Mark,

Back to Digests...

If these lines occur in mailman's crontab -

# Noon, mail digests for lists that do periodic as well as threshhold delivery.
0 12 * * * /opt/csw/bin/python -S /export/home/mailman/cron/senddigests

how will lists with digests enabled be affected?  If the list has a high
threshold, will it still have the contents of its digest sent?  Do options in
the configuration take precedence over the script?  If the intention is to
schedule sending of digests from cron for a particular list on specific days
only, will the script send the digest regardless of the threshold?  And, if you
disable the cronjob above, how will that affect any other lists on the mail
server where users arbitrarily choose to receive digests and list owners allow
this?

Thanks for your help,

Alan Rubin
Technician Unix
DCS Midrange Services
Phone: +61 (08) 8999 6814
Fax:      +61 (08) 8999 7493
e-Mail: alan.rubin at nt.gov.au


                                                                                
             Mark Sapiro                                                        
             <mark at msapiro.net>                                                 
                                                                             To 
             06/08/2008 12:28 PM         Alan.Rubin at nt.gov.au,                  
                                         mailman-users at python.org               
                                                                             cc 
                                                                                
                                                                        Subject 
                                         Re: [Mailman-Users] Digest options ->  
                                         list configuration                     
                                                                                
                                                                                
                                                                                
                                                                                
                                                                                
                                                                                




Alan.Rubin at nt.gov.au wrote:
>
>Thanks for your answer.  It is very enlightening.
>
>This is a bit of a tangent, but also has to do with 'interpretation' of
>Mailman's configuration.  If you read/work with the list configuration from the
>command line, using ~mailman/bin/config_list,  you will see many descriptions
>that say something such as:
>
>      # legal values are:
>      #    0 = "No"
>      #    1 = "Yes"
>
>But then the current/default value will be listed as True or False, literally.
>Which is it?  Are both 0/False and 1/True acceptable?


Yes they are. At least assuming your Python is 2.3 or later, and
assuming the attribute is one with only "Yes" or "No" possibilities.
Prior to 2.3 there were no built-in constants True and False. Since
Mailman through 2.1.8 was compatible with Python back to 2.1, we used
0 and 1 instead of False and True as values or we used a kludge like

try:
    True, False
except NameError:
    True = 1
    False = 0

to define True and False if they weren't built in. Eventually, Mailman
will move to using True and False everywhere to represent truth value
constants, but even then, some old lists will still have 1 or 0 as the
value of some list attributes just because they were set that way at
one time and never changed.

However, all the above has to do with the actual attribute value shown
by config_list -o or set by config_list -i.

In the actual text

# legal values are:
#    0 = "No"
#    1 = "Yes"

the 0 and 1 are the index of the radio button in the GUI for that
attribute

in the same way as, e.g.

# legal values are:
#    0 = "Accept"
#    1 = "Hold"
#    2 = "Reject"
#    3 = "Discard"

are the possible settings for generic_nonmember_action and

# legal values are:
#    0 = "No"
#    1 = "Yes"
#    2 = "Full Personalization"

are the possible settings for personalize.

The bottom line is if you see a setting reported as True or False, it's
OK to set it to False or True with config_list, but if the setting is
reported as 0 or 1, you can't be sure that the code doesn't somewhere
treat it as a number, so it is best to set it to a number.

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