[ mailman-Bugs-1809706 ] genaliases on Postfix is inefficient and can cause bounces

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Bugs item #1809706, was opened at 2007-10-08 19:31
Message generated for change (Comment added) made by cedders
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Category: command line scripts
Group: 2.1 (stable)
Status: Open
Resolution: None
Priority: 5
Private: No
Submitted By: Cedric Knight (cedders)
Assigned to: Nobody/Anonymous (nobody)
Summary: genaliases on Postfix is inefficient and can cause bounces

Initial Comment:
We're running Mailman 2.1.5-8sarge5 and Postfix 2.1.5-9 on a mail server with a few hundred lists.  For reasons described on Bug [ 1809697 ], we run genaliases as a cron job.

While genaliases is running, incoming posts and admin mail to some lists can bounce, with "550 User unknown in virtual alias table".  It appears that genaliases loops over all lists and calls 
MTA.create(mlist, nolock=True, quiet=quiet)
for each list, which in turn calls _update_maps() which runs Postfix's postmap and postalias commands.  Hence for a time while running genaliases the list of mappings loaded into Postfix is incomplete.  The process can also take over a minute because of this repeated hashing.

Suggested fix (would patch on Bazaar but repository is empty :) - 
add "if not nolock:" before
    _update_maps() 
in Mailman/MTA/Postfix.py

and call "MTA.create(None, quiet=quiet)" once more before 
    os.umask(omask)
in bin/genaliases



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>Comment By: Cedric Knight (cedders)
Date: 2007-10-08 19:42

Message:
Logged In: YES 
user_id=940941
Originator: YES

The issue also appears to be present in 2.1.9.

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