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

[David Magda]

On Tue, September 1, 2015 14:35, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
> Mark Sapiro writes:
>
>  > I don't know what you are grepping, but if it's the mbox, you shouldn't
>  > be looking for "\xea", you should be looking for "ê".
>
> At least on recent BSD-based systems "\xea" is a well-defined escape
> sequence, interpreted as the hexadecimal representation of a byte.
> Dunno about GNU or proprietary systems.  (POSIX.2)

This is GNU grep under Debian.

> s/just fine/incorrectly but conveniently for the sysadmin/. :-)
>
> I suppose it's possible that a Python upgrade wiped out a patch or
> configuration that told Python to use a Latin-N default encoding, so
> it reverted to ASCII.

Debian is fairly conservative about these things, and AFAIK, the OS
default was to use UTF-8, either en_US or en_CA. The locale did not change
during the upgrade.

> I suspect that Mailman's copy of the email libraries has also evolved
> quite a bit since 2.1.9 (I think that's what you upgraded from?), and
> if it was a Mailman provided by the OS vendor, all bets are off.  Who
> knows what patches they may have applied.

We are running 2.1.13 from tarballs and so the Mailman code did not change
when the archive web page generation stopped. The only thing that changed
was the version of Python (2.5 -> 2.6?) under the OS.

Doing a "arch --wipe mylist" seems to have solved the issue, though now
I'm curious to know why \xea was a problem before but suddenly isn't after
the wipe.