[Mailman-Users] Diagnosing command failures

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Peter Shute writes:

 > A lot of people use the cPanel version and can't do anything
 > complicated for support. Even though this particular case is about
 > trying to help a difficult user to do something that's normally
 > straightforward that's probably pointless anyway, I hope v3 at
 > least gives cPanel users access to more diagnostics than v2 does.

Don't hold your breath.  The problem is hosting services (and to some
extent cPanel itself), not Mailman.  If they wanted to provide the
kind of service you want, they could ask us for help and we'd give it
to them.  (Eg, it probably wouldn't be too hard to grep for specific
vhosts in the logs, and so minimize the probability of cross-vhost
personal information leakage.  Of course, if they wanted to do that
they probably already can.  Evidently they don't care. :-( )  But if
we added an option to (say) display the "smtp" log (or a hypothetical
"auth" log for the current thread) the first thing they'd do is
disable it in Defaults.py for the cPanel version since it would be too
likely to leak personal data across virtual domains.

We do have some work (courtesy Andrew Stuart) ongoing to improve
authentication for access to core databases in Mailman 3.  I don't
know exactly what that work is at the momemnt, but it might be
possible to leverage it so that subscribers and/or list owners could
use Mozilla Persona or OAuth2 to access the information they're
authorized for.  (Postorius already requires, or soon will require,
Persona for authorization IIRC.)  At least then you can pass the buck
for authn/authz issues to Google or Mozilla. ;-)

If you have *specific* diagnostics that don't violate the hosting
services' senses of propriety (and I suppose they normally won't be
problematic), please, *please*, PLEASE *ask* for them by name (a brief
description is fine, too, of course).  "More diagnostics" is not a
requirement we can use to specify and design new features.

Preferably a bug report to Launchpad, tagged "mailman3", but a post to
the list or a request on IRC would probably be picked up, too.