Mailman 3 June 2000 - Mailman-Developers

Announcing Mailman 2.0 beta 3
by bwarsaw＠beopen.com 29 Jun '00

29 Jun '00

Okay folks, I am finally releasing Mailman 2.0 beta 3. I think I have nailed the duplicates problem -- at least I have seen no duplicates in the last 24 hours on python.org, so I'm feeling good about it (we'll see if that lasts tomorrow morning :). Please give this version a thorough test; I'd like to have a much shorter release cycle for the next few betas. I am aiming to release 2.0 final on July 14th, the Friday before the O'Reilly OSSCON. I plan on spending time between now and then on slogging through the discussion lists and bug reports, and working on the documentation. See below for an excerpt from the NEWS file for changes since 2.0beta2. If you have not been following the CVS updates and are upgrading from 2.0 beta 2 or earlier PLEASE READ THE UPGRADING FILE! A crucial step is to reload your crontab.in file, otherwise you won't clear your message queue often enough (or perhaps not at all). Enjoy, -Barry -------------------- snip snip -------------------- 2.0 beta 3 (26-Jun-2000) - Delivery mechanism (qrunner) refined to support immediate queuing, queuing directly from MTA, and queuing on any error along the delivery pipeline. This means 1) that huge lists can't time out the MTA's program delivery channel; 2) it is much harder to completely lose messages; 3) eventually, qrunner will be elaborated to meter delivery to the MTA so as not to swamp it. The tradeoff is in more disk I/O since every message coming into the system (and most that are generated by the system) live on disk for some part of their journey through Mailman. For now, see the Default.py variables QRUNNER_PROCESS_LIFETIME and QRUNNER_MAX_MESSAGES for primitive resource management. The API to the pipeline handler modules has changed. See Mailman/Handlers/HandlerAPI.py for details. - Revamped admindb web page: held messages are split into headers and bodies so they are easier to vette; admins can now also preserve a held message (for spam evidence gathering) or forward the message to a specified email address; disposition of held messages can be deferred; held messages have a more context meaningful default rejection message. - Change to the semantics for `acceptable_aliases' list configuration variable, based on suggestions by Harald Meland. - New mm_cfg.py variables NNTP_USERNAME and NNTP_PASSWORD can be set on a site-wide basis if connection to your nntpd requires authentication. - The list attribute `num_spawns' has been removed. The mm_cfg.py variables MAX_SPAWNS, and DEFAULT_NUM_SPAWNS removed too. - LIST_LOCK_LIFETIME cranked to 5 hours and LIST_LOCK_TIMEOUT shortened to 10 seconds. QRUNNER_LOCK_LIFETIME cranked up to 10 hours. This should decrease the changes for bogus and harmful lock breaking. - Resent-to: is now one of the headers checked for explicit destinations. - Tons more bounce formats are recognized. The API to the bounce modules has changed. - A written LockFile module which should fix most (hopefully all) bugs in the locking machinery. Many improvements suggested by Thomas Wouters and Harald Meland. - Experimental support (disabled by default) for delivering SMTP chunks to the MTA via multiple threads. Your Python executable must have been compiled with thread support enabled, and you must set MAX_DELIVERY_THREADS in mm_cfg.py. Note that this may not improve your overall system performance. - Some changes and additions to scripts: bin/find_member now supports a -w/--owner flag to match regexps against mailing list owners; bin/find_member now supports multiple regexps; cron/gate_news command line option changes; new script bin/dumbdb for debugging purposes; bin/clone_member can now also remove the old address and change change the list owner addresses. - The News/Mail gateway admin page has a button that lets you do an explicit catchup of the newsgroup. - The CVS repository has been moved out to SourceForge. For more information, see the project summary at http://sourceforge.net/project/?group_id=103 - Lots 'o bug fixes and some performance improvements.

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beta 3?
by Chuq Von Rospach 28 Jun '00

28 Jun '00

How close are we to b3? -- Chuq Von Rospach - Plaidworks Consulting (mailto:chuqui@plaidworks.com) Apple Mail List Gnome (mailto:chuq@apple.com) And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar and say 'Man, what are you doing here?'"

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umbrella lists - restricted
by Philip Goisman 28 Jun '00

28 Jun '00

Dear Developers, I'd like to request that mailman umbrella lists include the restricted (closed) feature available to standalone mailman lists. Currently, moderation is required if a member of a sublist trys to post to its umbrella list. To administer an all inclusive restricted umbrella list with selected posters, I presently have to maintain a separate all inclusive (umbrella list) mailing list that duplicates the names of everyone in my lists I would like to keep under an umbrella list. Thank you for your consideration of this request. Regards, Philip

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admindb.py bug and patch again...
by Ron Jarrell 27 Jun '00

27 Jun '00

I sent this in earlier today, from my main account, but never saw it on the list... Nor, interestingly, is the list willing to send me my password (although it claims to); at least I haven't gotten it after waiting a while. I'm getting other people's messages from the list, so I'm sending this again from an alternate account, as a test to see if python.org is unhappy with my main one.. Anyway, there's a bug in admindb.py that crops up when you try to feed it an illegal address. syslog is missing an arg. Here's the simple patch: Index: admindb.py =================================================================== RCS file: /cvsroot/mailman/mailman/Mailman/Cgi/admindb.py,v retrieving revision 1.28 diff -r1.28 admindb.py 69c69 < syslog('No such list "%s": %s\n' % (listname, e)) --- > syslog('error','No such list "%s": %s\n' % (listname, e))

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announcement list option
by Brian Edmonds 27 Jun '00

27 Jun '00

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 I've mentioned this before, but having used Mailman for longer I'd like to bring it up again, as I think I have a better grasp on how it might be integrated with the existing software. Unfortunately I still haven't learned Python, so my ability to hack the code myself is somewhat limited. Anyhow, in some of my current lists, which I'd like to migrate to mailman, I have them set up with the usual regular and digest options, but also have an announce option. Mail sent to the announce list goes to all regular subscribers, as well as immediately to all digest subscribers (rather than being digested), and also to a third list of announcement only subscribers. In order to migrate these lists to Mailman I simply have to have this functionality. I would thus envision the following changes: 1) An announce list option added to the subscription and member management HTML interfaces (and subscription database, obviously). Operation when both digest and announce are selected would be as if just digest were selected, since announce is already a subset of digest. 2) An option on the regular list config interface (or an additional interface perhaps, like the digest one) to enable or disable the announce option, much like digest can be. Also options to enable or disable posting priviledges to the announce list (some are controlled, at least one I run is on the honour system), as well as specifying a list of accepted posters. Non-priviledged posters would be held for approval using the usual mechanism. 3) A flag to the posting software that indicates a post is an announcement, which would then be sent immediately to all non-nomail subscribers. An update to newlist to prompt for inclusion of an -announce alias (which would pass this new flag) would also be a good idea. Brian. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.0.1 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Processed by Mailcrypt 3.5.5 and Gnu Privacy Guard <http://www.gnupg.org/> iD8DBQE5WN/OcCEFQUX5+OwRAgdnAJ0aN0GWnEQa4LFMS9DesAPh80N+QACfYJie mK3m0Kdka+wvxIacUFso2J8= =wuyG -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Bug in admindb.py (with patch)
by Ron Jarrell 26 Jun '00

26 Jun '00

(Ok, actually, a typo; Barry forgot an argument) Index: admindb.py =================================================================== RCS file: /cvsroot/mailman/mailman/Mailman/Cgi/admindb.py,v retrieving revision 1.28 diff -r1.28 admindb.py 69c69 < syslog('No such list "%s": %s\n' % (listname, e)) --- > syslog('error','No such list "%s": %s\n' % (listname, e))

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bug in changing subscription options
by Jim Hebert 23 Jun '00

23 Jun '00

While trying to make a change (trying to set 'nomail' basically) via the web interface, for my subscription to mailman-users, I got We're sorry, we hit a bug! Mailman experienced a very low level failure and could not even generate a useful traceback for you. Please report this to the Mailman administrator at this site. Got it after submitting my password, which has a requisite amount of wierd characters in it. =) Linux 2.2, Netscape 4.73, no proxies, accepting cookies, etc., ie pretty normal setup on my end. (I haven't been following closely, so sorry if this is a known problem in the snapshot that is running that list.) jim -- Jim Hebert http://www.cosource.com/ jim(a)cosource.com The cooperative market for open source software "Well actually I was considering opening a market in flying pigs. Mostly because it would be more practical...." -- Alan Cox

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Re: [Mailman-Developers] Indexing pipermail archives
by J C Lawrence 23 Jun '00

23 Jun '00

On Fri, 23 Jun 2000 12:43:20 -0400 (EDT) Jeremy Hylton <jeremy(a)beopen.com> wrote: > Speaking as a non-expert, these changes sound good reasonable. Do > robots other than htdig understand these meta tags? My experience, from watching my Apache logs (I'm very well indexed), is that ALL of the commercial search engine spiders and robots honour both robots.txt and the robots meta tag. -- J C Lawrence Home: claw(a)kanga.nu ----------(*) Other: coder(a)kanga.nu --=| A man is as sane as he is dangerous to his environment |=--

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Re: [Mailman-Developers] including subscribe address in message
by J C Lawrence 23 Jun '00

23 Jun '00

On Fri, 23 Jun 2000 09:23:42 +0100 Nigel Metheringham <Nigel.Metheringham(a)VData.co.uk> wrote: > fife(a)AnywhereYouGo.com said: >> I would like to include a line that says: You are subscribed as: >> fife(a)AnwyhereYouGo.com > If you use exim (and what sane person wouldn't [*]), then you > could modify your list handling so that a dedicated transport is > used for outgoing list SMTP. This transport could have the > maximum recipients set to one, and add a header to each message - > say seomthing like X-List-Subscription-Address: > fife(a)AnwyhereYouGo.com Ooo! Oooo! Who is going to be the first to write the stanza for this (or has it been done already)? -- J C Lawrence Home: claw(a)kanga.nu ----------(*) Other: coder(a)kanga.nu --=| A man is as sane as he is dangerous to his environment |=--

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Re: [Mailman-Developers] Indexing pipermail archives
by Nigel Metheringham 23 Jun '00

23 Jun '00

jeremy(a)beopen.com said: > Speaking as a non-expert, these changes sound good reasonable. Do > robots other than htdig understand these meta tags? I only mentioned them at all because they are supposed to be a generic standard... what uses them is a different question. The URL I quoted was for webcrawler, so that does use those metas.. unless there is good reason to do otherwise I'd like to throw my weight behind making a reason for other engines to take up those metas. I have a test implementation in use - will submit patches soon. Nigel. -- [ - Opinions expressed are personal and may not be shared by VData - ] [ Nigel Metheringham Nigel.Metheringham(a)VData.co.uk ] [ Phone: +44 1423 850000 Fax +44 1423 858866 ]

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