[Mailman-Users] Encoding problem with 2.15 to 2.18 upgrade with Finnish

[Mark Sapiro]

On 01/07/2016 12:40 PM, Eva Isaksson wrote:
> 2016-01-07 22:12 GMT+02:00 Mark Sapiro <mark at msapiro.net
> <mailto:mark at msapiro.net>>:
> On 01/07/2016 11:44 AM, Mark Sapiro wrote:
> 
>> I think simply re-entering the description and saving changes will fix
>> this, but you should probably go through the entire web admin UI and do
>> the same for any other non-ascii strings.
> 
> Am I right in thinking that this option would mean choosing the debian utf-8
> alternative? We have some 750 lists, so checking all of them would have to
> happen outside the web admin UI, i.e. from command line.


You can keep the Debian package with it's utf-8 character sets and
programmatically change all your lists so they work. In MM 2.1.19 I
changed the character sets for Russian and Romanian from koi8-r and
iso-8859-2 respectively to utf-8 because I was convinced that the former
character sets were not appropriate for those languages. In so doing, I
augmented Mailman's version updater to identify strings in list
attributes that were not valid utf-8 and convert them from the former
character set.

This is an imperfect process. It does guarantee that all the strings in
list attributes are valid utf-8 encodings, but not necessarily that they
are 'correct'.

I am working on a stand-alone script to do this. I will post it later today.


>> You could install Mailman from source. See the FAQ at
>> <http://wiki.list.org/x/17891606> for info.
> 
> Does this allow for keeping all the settings and passwords from the old
> package
> installation intact? The number of lists is so big that I want to be on
> the safe
> side.


Yes. Installing the latest GNU Mailman source over the Debian package
following <http://wiki.list.org/x/17891606> will not change any list
data, but there may be other issues depending on what if any Debian
patches you choose to install.

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