Mailman 3 November 1998 - Mailman-Developers

feature suggestion
by Darren Henderson 10 Nov '98

10 Nov '98

Very low priority idea... Might be nice if list members could simple line of text (might consist of a url) that could be stored in the database and accessed via the list membership pages. I think I would mingle the digest and non-digest addresses and just flag the digest ones. Then in the right hand display the above user info. They might wish to supply additional contact information for instance. ______________________________________________________________________ Darren Henderson darren(a)jasper.somtel.com Help fight junk e-mail, visit http://www.cauce.org/

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Re: [Mailman-Developers] Internationalization
by Tomas Fasth 10 Nov '98

10 Nov '98

John, I think making a separate branch in cvs for this is a good idea, as a matter of fact, it is IMO the only reasonable way to deal with parallel activities. My experience with cvs says that a later merge is fairly straight forward. Besides, most probable is that merges are made into the i18n branch to incorporate bug fixes and such from the 1.0 branch. At some point, before the release of 1.1, the i18n branch will probably take the lead (becoming head version). Regrettably, I am in the coming months heavily booked and should therefore not get involved in mailman coding (I need more time to do a good job). I can however provide a Swedish translation and serve as a (Swedish) test site for the i18n efford. Tomas

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Internationalization
by Francois Bedard 10 Nov '98

10 Nov '98

Following up on the lead by Harald Meland, Tomas Fasth, John Viega and earlier postings in the archives... As preliminary research for a project at the Universite du Quebec a Montreal, we've been looking for an open source mailing list manager which could be translated into French - or, better yet, internationalized so that local versions could be easily produced for any number of languages. We haven't yet decided on what program would be the most interesting - we might go with Sympa, which already offers a French interface alongside the default English one, as we might drop the project altogether. On the other hand, should we decide mostly on the basis of perceived potential, Mailman, for little we've seen, would appear to have a number of commending features: Python being one, the web interface, GNU label and apparent dynamism being others. Our objective is more ambitious than that expressed by Harald Meland though. We'd specifically like to: 1) Translate the web interface and all messages generated by Mailman. 2) Translate the commands (e.g. "subscribe" and the like) or offer the possibility of using either the English form or a local version - the reason being that intended users might include people unfamiliar with both English and computers. 3) Add any such feature as would be needed to preserve the integrity of the content (I'm thinking accented characters and the like) where possible, or its sensible adaptation where limitations would so dictate (that is, a preference for Unicode over ASCII and ASCII over garbled). We'd appreciate if someone could give us an idea of the work involved to bring this about. Any comment on the comparative merits of Mailman would come handy as well. Since interest has by now been expressed for a number of languages, perhaps this could be made into a more concerted effort... Thanks to all, Francois Bedard UQAM Montreal

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Re: [Mailman-Developers] Internationalization
by Tomas Fasth 09 Nov '98

09 Nov '98

Harald, I did brought this up a while ago (Sept. 4), and there was a response from Ken Manheimer. He explained that because the core developers currently are trying to stablize a 1.0 release the issue of internationalization (i18n) is not currently on the priority list. I was about to point you to the archives, but couldn't find anything before Oct 2. Instead I'll send you a copy in private, don't want to duplicate it on this list. Like you I am prepared to do a translation (in my case Swedish). I did try a translation of the human presentation text in the 1.0b5 release, but gave up after a while when I realized it got a little bit too complicated with too many modules involved. In order to achieve i18n of mailman, it definitely involves some architectural considerations and (at least) partial change of the code. There seem to exist ideas in the heads of the core developers on how to achieve i18n in mailman. But we might have to give them some time and bring this up again later. Tomas

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gate_news gone mad
by Corbett J. Klempay 09 Nov '98

09 Nov '98

First: thanks to Scott...he spent some time on the machine last night finding some oddness (I don't know that we're sure yet why it set a bunch of the symlinks wrong....but it works now, so hey :) Now: I got an email when I woke up (just recently :) that mailman was spiking the load like mad. Sure enough, watching top revealed that it was spawning ~70 mailman processes every few minutes, which drove the load up to ~30...the processes would run for <= 5 seconds or so max and be gone. I thought it must be a cron job issue, and gate_news is the only thing with an interval anywhere near that small (I didn't watch forever to make sure it was 5 minutes, but it looked to be in the ballpark). After reinstalling that crontab file with gate_news commented it, the spikes have stopped. Has anyone else seen weird gate_news behavior before? We don't need it here...we don't do any gating. I'm fairly sure I had it commented out in the previous (b5) installation, but I'm not positive. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Corbett J. Klempay Quote of the Week: http://www2.acm.jhu.edu/~cklempay "Conscience is the inner voice that warns up that someone may be looking." PGP Fingerprint: 7DA2 DB6E 7F5E 8973 A8E7 347B 2429 7728 76C2 BEA1 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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eSquire mailing list manager
by A.M. Kuchling 09 Nov '98

09 Nov '98

I attended a local Linux user group meeting on Saturday, and one presentation was by the author of the eSquire mailing list manager. The eSquire home page is at http://www.gamerz.net/eSquire/ . It's quite similar to Mailman in the capabilities that it supports; the major difference is that users only interact with it through e-mail, but administrators can do anything via the Web. In Mailman, subscribers can use the Web for setting their options, and some tasks, such as creating a new list, can only be done from the command line. (As a result, the code that creates new lists in eSquire needs to be setuid root in order to edit the aliases file.) Features that might be of interest for Mailman: * There are more classes of users. On a moderated list, some users can be set to have their posts automatically approved. There's also a list of banned users, who can follow the list but can't post. * Another list subscription policy: eSquire has open and closed lists as Mailman does, and adds a third level in-between, where any current subscriber can add new subscribers to the list. * Unsubscribes can require approval (useful for work-related lists) * You can create autoresponders. This is really orthogonal to mailing list handling, but you can create an autoresponder address which forwards any mail sent to it, and returns a response. For example, the author's e-mail is 'rrognlie', so he set up a forwarder for 'rognlie' to give people the correct address. At the moment the author is employed by Erols, a local ISP, and wrote eSquire for internal use. Soon he'll be changing jobs to work for Sendmail, Inc. -- A.M. Kuchling http://starship.skyport.net/crew/amk/ Well, me whole family's musical, Jeffo... even the sewing machine's a Singer. -- John Constantine in HELLBLAZER #90

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CVS Problem?
by Jeffrey C. Ollie 09 Nov '98

09 Nov '98

Hmmm... while trying to do a "cvs update" I ran into the following problem. This error occurs even if I start fresh. max $ date Sat Nov 7 11:32:14 CST 1998 max $ cvs --version Concurrent Versions System (CVS) 1.10.3 (client/server) [...] max $ cvs -z6 update -d -P [...] cvs server: Updating doc cvs server: Updating doc/IPC7 cvs server: failed to create lock directory in repository `/projects/cvsroot/mailman/doc/IPC7': Permission denied cvs server: failed to obtain dir lock in repository `/projects/cvsroot/mailman/doc/IPC7' cvs [server aborted]: read lock failed - giving up

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patch for password-reminder message
by Greg Stein 09 Nov '98

09 Nov '98

Here is a patch to automatically adjust the listinfo text for the reminder message. A small tweak to templates/listinfo.html:76 also needs to be made to replace the text with <MM-Reminder>. -g -- Greg Stein, http://www.lyra.org/

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load history
by Corbett J. Klempay 08 Nov '98

08 Nov '98

I don't know if anyone finds it useful in relation to my last message, but we have a graphical load monitor for the last day for the machine at http://www2.acm.jhu.edu/~slipcon/graphs/ It's chimera.acm.jhu.edu. Hehhee...the scale for the graph had to be adjusted to max out at 44 :) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Corbett J. Klempay Quote of the Week: http://www2.acm.jhu.edu/~cklempay "Conscience is the inner voice that warns up that someone may be looking." PGP Fingerprint: 7DA2 DB6E 7F5E 8973 A8E7 347B 2429 7728 76C2 BEA1 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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Re: [Mailman-Users] mailman using old sendmail
by Scott 08 Nov '98

08 Nov '98

On Sat, Nov 07, 1998 at 09:08:35PM -0500, farul ghazali wrote: | Scott, | | THanks for trying to help. Here's the transcript you wanted. I would | personally love to upgrade the system, but I only take care of the machine | part time, the full time sysadmin is too swamped to do it herself now, No wonder she's swamped, running stuff that out of date ;) | but | she doesn't want me to do it either :-) updating mailers is a pain. | Again, much thanks. Oh, fyi, I'm using the 1.0b6 sources that was just | posted a few nights ago. Ogay, here's a patch (apply it to $prefix/mailman/Mailman/smtplib.py): It'll work :) 160c160 < if c == '5': --- > elif c == '5': 162c162 < if c not in '123': --- > elif c not in '123': 169a170,174 > > This is actually more of a problem with mailman's smtplib than anything else. The way it was coded, it was translating all errors into protocol errors, and the attempt to get esmpt access using EHLO instead of HELO revealed that. scott

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