[Mailman-Users] Warnings from senddigests

[Mark Sapiro]

Jesper Dybdal wrote:

>I've just installed Mailman version 2.1.11.
>
>In general, it works fine.


Given the below, I'm surprised.


>Whenever my mailman cron job runs senddigests, I get the following
>warnings (on stdout or stderr, mailed to me by cron):
>
>>/home/mailman/Mailman/Handlers/Scrubber.py:192: DeprecationWarning: get_type() deprecated; use get_content_type()
>>  ctype = part.get_type(part.get_default_type())
>>/home/mailman/Mailman/Handlers/Scrubber.py:303: DeprecationWarning: get_type() deprecated; use get_content_type()
>>  ctype = part.get_type()
>>List: jdtest: problem processing /home/mailman/lists/jdtest/digest.mbox:
>>iso-8859-15
>
>The first two sounds like very minor problems in Scrubber.py.


Mailman 2.1.11 is not compatible with Python 2.6. Most of the errors
are deprecation warnings similar to those above and also involving
hashlib. You'll probably find lots more in Mailman's error log.

There are however more serious problems involving string exceptions and
also incompatibilites in the email package. I'm surprised it works at
all, unless this is a package that doesn't install email 2.5.8 in
Mailman's pythonlib.


>I wonder about the last one.  My test list does have messages in ISO
>8815-15 (that is the character set my mail client uses for a message
>containing the Euro sign - at least if it also contains the Danish
>non-usascii letters).
>
>I currently have to digest subscribers, so I don't know if this a real
>problem.  Does Mailman perhaps simply not support ISO 8859-15?


Mailman supports any character set supported by the underlying Python
and should not have any problems with iso-8859-15, The error message
you get from senddigests is not too informative. All it says is that
something in the send digest processing for the jdtest list threw an
exception and the error message from the exception was 'iso-8859-15'.
Thus it's pretty hard to diagnose, but you need to address the Python
incompatibility first anyway, and that may solve the other problem.

If you installed from source, you can rerun configure with
--with-python pointing to a Python 2.4 or 2.5 and make install, or you
can get the current 2.1 branch from Launchpad (bzr branch
lp:mailman/stable) which is Python 2.6 compatible and install that
(there will be a 2.1.12 release soon).

If you installed from a package and don't want to upgrade to the latest
2.1 source from Launchpad, you will have to do whatever is necessary
to make your package use an older Python.

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