[Mailman-Users] UnicodeDecodeError with Mailman 2.1 and Python 2.6

[David Magda]

Hello,

We recently upgrade from Debian 5 to 6, and are now having issues with
Mailman. Messages are still flowing properly, but the web archives are not
being generated since the upgrade.

When I run 'bin/arch mylistname' I get the following:

[...]
figuring article archives
2005-October
/usr/local/mailman-2.1.20/Mailman/Archiver/HyperDatabase.py:176:
UnicodeWarning: Unicode equal comparison failed to convert both arguments
to Unicode - interpreting them as being unequal
  self.dict = marshal.load(fp)
/usr/local/mailman-2.1.20/Mailman/Archiver/HyperDatabase.py:74:
UnicodeWarning: Unicode equal comparison failed to convert both arguments
to Unicode - interpreting them as being unequal
  self.sorted.sort()
Updating index files for archive [2004-December]
[...]
Updating HTML for article 214
Pickling archive state into
/usr/local/mailman-2.1.20/archives/private/mylistname/pipermail.pck
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "bin/arch", line 201, in <module>
    main()
  File "bin/arch", line 189, in main
    archiver.processUnixMailbox(fp, start, end)
  File "/usr/local/mailman-2.1.20/Mailman/Archiver/pipermail.py", line
586, in processUnixMailbox
    self.add_article(a)
  File "/usr/local/mailman-2.1.20/Mailman/Archiver/pipermail.py", line
638, in add_article
    article.parentID = parentID = self.get_parent_info(arch, article)
  File "/usr/local/mailman-2.1.20/Mailman/Archiver/pipermail.py", line
658, in get_parent_info
    if self.database.hasArticle(archive, article.in_reply_to):
  File "/usr/local/mailman-2.1.20/Mailman/Archiver/HyperDatabase.py", line
279, in hasArticle
    self.__openIndices(archive)
  File "/usr/local/mailman-2.1.20/Mailman/Archiver/HyperDatabase.py", line
257, in __openIndices
    t = DumbBTree(os.path.join(arcdir, archive + '-' + i))
  File "/usr/local/mailman-2.1.20/Mailman/Archiver/HyperDatabase.py", line
66, in __init__
    self.load()
  File "/usr/local/mailman-2.1.20/Mailman/Archiver/HyperDatabase.py", line
185, in load
    self.__sort(dirty=1)
  File "/usr/local/mailman-2.1.20/Mailman/Archiver/HyperDatabase.py", line
74, in __sort
    self.sorted.sort()
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xea in position 3:
ordinal not in range(128)

We're running 2.1.13, but as you can see, the problem persists even with
the latest release. We're using the stock Debian Python (2.6.6), but
Mailman for tarballs.

Thanks for any info.

Regards,
David