[Mailman-Users] Diagnosing command failures

[Mark Sapiro]

On 01/21/2015 06:25 AM, Gary Merrill wrote:
> 
> Finally, let's consider "The problem here is we don't anticipate a third
> party acting at a distance and unable to get reliable information from his
> user."  Why not?  This seems quite a reasonable scenario to anticipate.
> Users are notoriously unreliable in what they report and how they report it.
> And the user can provide information that's only as reliable and accurate as
> what he gets from the list in terms of diagnostics.  I feel a pontificating
> lecture coming on about user interaction design, but I'll refrain :-).


All this is moot. Mailman 2.1 is over 12 years old and (hopefully) near
the end of it's life cycle. The UI in Mailman 3 is more modular and
completely different.

Maybe the above scenario is reasonable to expect, but it is apparently
infrequent enough that your's is the only such request I've ever seen.


> At this point it's quite clear that the problem with this user is that he
> keeps using the wrong password.  I've told him that, but I somehow have to
> (nicely) rub his nose in it.  Without setting up an appointment with him and
> travelling about 50 miles round trip (which is going to be unlikely with
> him), there's not much I can do.  But the simple change I've suggested in
> this one particular diagnostic response would allow me to help him remotely.


And, you could send him an email with a
<mailto:LISTNAME-request at ...?subject=who%20PASSWORD> link in it hand
have him just click that and send.

I assume you can find his password with something like

bin/dumpdb lists/LISTNAME/config.pck | grep <his email>

since your original request was for logs.

And for the third time, if you want patches, ask and I'll send you
patches. In any case, this will get you something faster than waiting
for a new Mailman release.

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