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

[Mark Sapiro]

On 09/01/2015 06:55 PM, David Magda wrote:
> 
> The message in question seems to be from October 2005, and it has the "Subject: Você […]” header. Running under Debian 5 (Python 2.5), archive processing wasn’t an issue: messages were coming into the mbox and the HTML page was being generated until August 25. I then did the upgrade on that day.
> 
> The mbox then no longer has messages until September 1, the day when I did “arch —wipe”, even though the mail.log shows messages coming in (and going out AFAICT).


So what has probably happened is that archiving has been broken since
the upgrade on Aug 25. There should be a an error message with traceback
in Mailman's 'error' log for each message that wasn't archived. More
importantly, the unarchived messages should all be in Mailman's 'shunt'
queue and running Mailman's bin/unshunt should process them for the archive.


> So would there be anything besides a “—wipe” that could otherwise be done to prevent this archive breakage? Attempt a “cleanarch" first? Seems strange that a message from 2005 could stop archive processing for current years/months.


Presumably, you did some kind of bin/arch process on Aug 25. The answer
is don't do that. Or if you didn't do that, then the answer may lie in
whatever changed in Python.

You should never be running bin/arch without --wipe unless you are
importing archives from elsewhere to be added to an existing archive,
and even in that case, it might be preferable to stop Mailman,
concatenate the existing Mailman mbox and import mbox into a combined
mbox and run 'bin/arch --wipe'. Then after success, start Mailman again.

You should also consider running the contrib/mmdsr script from the
Mailman source distro or if not that, somehow looking a Mailman's error
log frequently for problems to discover them sooner.

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