Mailman 3 September 2000 - Mailman-Developers

some more futures on mailman...
by Chuq Von Rospach 14 Sep '00

14 Sep '00

Just want to toss these into the archives for future consideration... I'm currently trying (desperately) to get a system into production that involves mailman. Or more correctly, a site with multiple virtual hosts. My medium-term plan is to run mailing lists across three domains (www.plaidworks.com, www.hockeyfanz.com, www.chuqui.com). And using mailman, I'm finding it's simply impossible to create a consistent look/feel on a single domain, because it doesn't (yet) easily let me do things like footers/headers (and yes, I know there's a patch pending for that) -- but when we start talking about running a single instance of mailman across multiple virtual hosts, this all dies a horrible death. The only real way t do this now is to run an instance of mailman for each virtual host. That's really, really gnarly from a maintenance standpoit, nt to mention just rife with the ability to get it wrong on deadline -- and even then, mailman isn't really cooperative about living within a site's look/feel yet.. So it's beginning to look like we need to find a way present a look/feel based on domain name, defining sets of headers/footers on a per domain basis, but there are also other pages that generally need tweaking (most especially, every domain probably needs to tweak /mailman/listinfo to some degree, even if it's changing the introductory text....) I don't have time to figure out how to fix this yet, but I wanted to throw it into the mix until I do. Right now, I'm dealing with it the way you normally do on deadline -- by punting and going production without an integrated look/feel (don't feel bad, I have the same problem with my discussion forums, albeit those don't cross domains so the solutions are in theory easier). This is all clearly post 2.0 stuff, but it needs to go On The List.... Hmm. If we take the pending patch for global headers/footers, add a tweak so we can define them by domain (header-hockeyfanz.com-html, et al), we might be able to fake this. But we still need to add another tweak to allow us to store that listinfo intro paragraph into a file, and do the same vhosting hack to it, too. Maybe it *can* be done, or at least hide enough of it. But I'll look at this further after I go live. Running out of time... chuq (here I go again...) -- 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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Re: [Mailman-Developers] Error in scripts/driver?
by Dan Mick 14 Sep '00

14 Sep '00

Actually, from comments in Defaults.py.in, it looks like that should have a from Mailman.Version import VERSION in it, so that importing Defaults or mm_cfg should get it...but I don't know how to use cvs log well enough to find out when the import was dropped from Defaults.py.in but it does look like a bug all right. > Looks like line 121 of scripts/driver needs to say > from Mailman.Version import VERSION > instead of > from Mailman.mm_cfg import VERSION > > Otherwise, I get ImportError during the traceback report.

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pipermail -- time zone in date info
by Tokio Kikuchi 12 Sep '00

12 Sep '00

Hi, I was a little bit uneasy on that pipermail's index pages show `Starting:', `Ending:', and `Last message date:' information in GMT time zone, while `Archived on:' in the Local Time. I was able to make a dirty hack to set the time zone value in mm_cfg.py but feel like not to publish it because the server (platform/OS) should have the time zone info in itself. Can someone make a better patch for it and upload ? Thanks in advance. Tokio Kikuchi

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Re: [Mailman-Developers] patches
by J C Lawrence 08 Sep '00

08 Sep '00

On Thu, 7 Sep 2000 23:22:00 -0500 David Champion <dgc(a)uchicago.edu> wrote: > I've been posting a big pile of patches on the Sourceforge > repository. I think they're mostly stable now. They're largely > cosmetic, so in case anyone wants to look at the results, please > check out A very small detail in your documentation: Don't camelcase "Mailman" as "MailMan" (I used to too). MailMan is a different commercial product. Mailman is the list server we all know and love. You might also want to touch up the table handling at: https://listtest.uchicago.edu/mailman/listinfo It displays badly when the browser window is narrow (as mine is). I've attached a JPEG to show. Very nice job BTW. -- J C Lawrence Home: claw(a)kanga.nu ---------(*) Work: claw(a)nuron.com http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/ Keys etc: finger claw(a)kanga.nu --=| A man is as sane as he is dangerous to his environment |=--

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Re: attached files
by Tom Neff 08 Sep '00

08 Sep '00

Scanning the yards of WaeQrlREucsGO4BuAdjnO0bq6SXXNHh+w+bqllH/AGhj7F... in my latest mailman-developers DIGEST (thanks J C) reminded me of something I really wish Mailman would add: the ability to detach binary attachments, STORE them on the site server, and insert URL's into the plain text of the original messages/Digests, so that interested readers (and ONLY interested readers) could pull them up on demand, rather than be forced to take them in the Inbox unconditionally and even then maybe not see them properly.

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patches
by David Champion 08 Sep '00

08 Sep '00

I've been posting a big pile of patches on the Sourceforge repository. I think they're mostly stable now. They're largely cosmetic, so in case anyone wants to look at the results, please check out http://listtest.uchicago.edu/ The "dgctest1" list's archives are public, and completely uninteresting. I'm using the built-in pipermail for now. I'll probably change that in a few weeks to MHonArc. But first, I'll post more patches to drive the pipermail HTML into compliance with the rest of the pages, just to be thorough about it. All the customization on the site is done it mm_cfg.py or in the templates files. I've attached my mm_cfg.py so you can see the config parameters I've altered. With the default mm_cfg.py and templates, the whole thing looks identical to the current default mailman installation. In particular, one of my patches converts all the hard-coded HTML in listinfo.py and admin.py into templates. The "tone" of the document on this server is governed in mm_cfg, but the textual content, the "shortcuts" box, etc are in the template. These are configuration options I learned to want with our 1.0 installation. OK, just wanted this to be out there so people can see what I'm hoping for -- maybe it'll be helpful in deciding whether to incorporate the patches. Any thoughts? I probably should not go into production with this if there's strong sentiment against it. -- -D. dgc(a)uchicago.edu NSIT University of Chicago

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Feature idea for Mailman 2.x
by Shane Y. Gibson 06 Sep '00

06 Sep '00

Hello, I use a small install of Mailman to manager our companies internal mailing lists. It works pretty well. However, I have an idea that may of interest. I've recently had lots of users ask what mailing lists they are members of (yeah, I know, but they **are** users!). I know this can be done with command line tools, but what about a *-request option? I.e. TO: genericlist-request(a)foobar.com Subject: show-lists Or something to that effect. v/r Shane -- Shane Y. Gibson sgibson(a)digitalimpact.com Sr. Network Engineer (650) 356-3432 work IT Data Center Operations (650) 444-8992 cellular Digital Impact, Inc. (888) 786-4863 pager "The Science of eMarketing!" (650) 356-3515 fax "The world is, for the most part, a collective mad- house, and practically everyone, however `normal' his facade, is faking sanity." -- John Astin

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preview: v2 admin docs
by Christopher Kolar 05 Sep '00

05 Sep '00

I have updated the Mailman administration documents in preparation for the upcoming v2.0 release. Right now the pages are not being promoted for public consumption and I will not link them in until the official release. I would appreciate it if members of the development team could take a look and let me know if there are any glaring errors. The new admin docs, based on beta 5, are at: http://www.aurora.edu/~ckolar/mailman/mailman-administration-v2.html I have also put together a short document showing the changes that have occurred since v1.1 as that is something that I am sure a lot of people will be asking about. The diffs document is at: http://www.aurora.edu/~ckolar/mailman/mailman-administration-v2-diffs.html Thanks in advance for any comments. --chris -- /////\\\\\/////\\\\\ Christopher G. Kolar Director, Department of Instructional Technology Aurora University, Aurora, Illinois ckolar(a)admin.aurora.edu -- www.aurora.edu/~ckolar [PGP Public Key ID: 0xC6492C72]

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Low priority suggestion: addressing
by John_Larson＠cargill.com 05 Sep '00

05 Sep '00

Handle "/" in usernames on mail addresses. HP Openmail uses a last_first/mnode(a)mnode.domain format for it's email addreses when referencing them from SMTP. The CGI uses the / as a delimiter for tokens so it thinks that the address is "last_first" instead of "last_first/mnode(a)mnode.domain". Emailing to lists and subscribing to addresses with this format DOES WORK. It's only the admin CGI that is broken because of the parsing. I did a quick hack to handle_opts.py and options.py that basically "looked" for more than the ones expected for the CGI and then appended the second parameter to the first, concatenating a "/" inbetween. This is nasy and site specific so I won't publish the code here. (or explain it really well :) What really should be done is to escape the / in the form or something like that. If I had more python and CGI background I would have submitted a patch but... Thanks! -John Larson / john_larson(a)cargill.com

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A couple of mailman problems (minor)
by Chuq Von Rospach 04 Sep '00

04 Sep '00

A couple of things I've noticed about mailman recently: 1) remove_members doesn't have an option to unsubscribe a user without sending the "goodbye" message. it's not something I need often, but there are times when it's necessary. 2) more serious -- I've been running into some problems with passwords, and I've finally tracked down a major cause of user confusion with passwords. Mailman passwords use random strings of characters, but some of the characters can be confused with each other by users -- specifically the one (1), the upper case I and lower case l, and zero (0) and upper case o. In the cases I've been able to resolve, the password problems that weren't caused by not realizing each list's password is different were caused by the l/1/I problem. so I'd like to suggest that mailman not use potentially confusing letters in their passwords. -- 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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