Mailman 3 October 2004 - Mailman-Developers

RE: [Mailman-Developers] Min requirements for running Mailman?
by John.Airey＠rnib.org.uk May 31, 2005

May 31, 2005

> -----Original Message----- > From: mailman-developers-bounces+john.airey=rnib.org.uk(a)python.org > [mailto:mailman-developers-bounces+john.airey=rnib.org.uk@pyth > on.org]On > Behalf Of Tollef Fog Heen > Sent: Monday, 06 September 2004 16:47 > To: mailman-developers(a)python.org > Subject: Re: [Mailman-Developers] Min requirements for > running Mailman? > > > * Nigel Metheringham > > | I'd tend to take this as:- > | * Mailman is a bitch to package > > Not really. It's fairly well-behaved in my experience. It's a > semi-large web application with some requirements, but nothing > unreasonable. > > | * RH have packaged it for a while > | * RH found a good few of the gotchas in packaging Mailman > | * RH have subsequently learnt from their mistakes and recently > | have produced good packages. > | * Other distros may do better, or may yet have to > learn from their > | mistakes :-) > > Mailman has been in Debian since June 1998 (1.0b4), so we've been > working on it for a while as well. I think our packages are of good > quality (far from perfect, but making perfect packages is _a lot_ of > work. ;) > Just to throw my tuppence worth in... I've used mailman since Red Hat 7.2. I found that the version that came with Red Hat 9.0 wouldn't work for me (ie I couldn't upgrade to it) so I stuck with the 7.2 version (2.0.13) till the end of Red Hat 9 support. We are now running the 2.1.5 version that comes with Fedora but running it on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). I did however have to recreate all the lists by hand in an overnight shift (what fun that was...) a few days before leaving the country (hence the rush). At that time I didn't know I could export the configuration (Doh!). Red Hat have taken some packages out of RHEL eg arpwatch and mysql-server (although this is in the "extras" channel) even though these are in the source RPM. Mailman is currently not included but might be being put back in to RHEL 4.0. I would like to hope so, as I find 2.1.5 far superior to 2.0.13. -- John Airey, BSc (Jt Hons), CNA, RHCE Internet systems support officer, ITCSD, Royal National Institute of the Blind, Bakewell Road, Peterborough PE2 6XU, Tel.: +44 (0) 1733 375299 Fax: +44 (0) 1733 370848 John.Airey(a)rnib.org.uk To truly believe in Evolution requires complete faith that life has no meaning. Fortunately there are billions of people who aren't that stupid. -- DISCLAIMER: NOTICE: The information contained in this email and any attachments is confidential and may be privileged. If you are not the intended recipient you should not use, disclose, distribute or copy any of the content of it or of any attachment; you are requested to notify the sender immediately of your receipt of the email and then to delete it and any attachments from your system. RNIB endeavours to ensure that emails and any attachments generated by its staff are free from viruses or other contaminants. However, it cannot accept any responsibility for any such which are transmitted. We therefore recommend you scan all attachments. Please note that the statements and views expressed in this email and any attachments are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RNIB. RNIB Registered Charity Number: 226227 Website: http://www.rnib.org.uk

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referring fix_url.py
by Tokio Kikuchi Oct. 31, 2004

Oct. 31, 2004

Hi developers, Since there are so many questions on 'how to fix exsiting list url', I want to add comments on fix_url.py in the ditribution documents. I am not a native english writer, so can someone fix my patch? TIA Tokio Index: INSTALL =================================================================== --- INSTALL (.../trunk) (revision 68) +++ INSTALL (.../branches/test_branch) (revision 68) @@ -435,7 +435,10 @@ add_virtualhost(DEFAULT_URL_HOST, DEFAULT_EMAIL_HOST) + Note that you may also want to run bin/fix_url.py to change + existing lists' domain. + 5. Customize Mailman You should do these steps using the account you installed Mailman Index: Mailman/Defaults.py.in =================================================================== --- Mailman/Defaults.py.in (.../trunk) (revision 68) +++ Mailman/Defaults.py.in (.../branches/test_branch) (revision 68) @@ -137,6 +137,8 @@ # VIRTUAL_HOST['www.dom.ain'] # ==> 'dom.ain' # +# Note also that you have to run bin/fix_url.py if you want to change existing +# lists' domain. Read the help output from the script for detail. def add_virtualhost(urlhost, emailhost=None): DOT = '.' if emailhost is None:

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locking and big lists
by Fil Oct. 30, 2004

Oct. 30, 2004

Hello, I have had a big problem with Mailman yesterday and today: two or three hours after I sent out my "big list" message (150 000 subscribers), Mailman started to spend all its time using CPU, for ages. In fact, it was the bounce runner that had started to send out the "probe" messages, one by one, making VirginRunner lock the list repeatedly, and holding the lock for 15s each time. Meanwhile the web admin interface was unreachable (for that list), and other scripts waited and failed. I finally looked everywhere to find out what was happening, and cleaned up the qfiles/virgin/ queue of all the probes, and waited another two hours for the qflies/command/ queue to empty... not very good. As I have a very big server (4 CPUs, 6Gbytes of RAM), I suppose that only a MySQL-backed Mailman would answer this problem. How far is it from being usable? -- Fil

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Bug in Membership list search?
by Peter Lombrozo Oct. 29, 2004

Oct. 29, 2004

I think I found a bug in Mailman 2.1.5 Membership list search. When my search hits needs several pages to display the members, a letter list at the top links to the other alphabetical pages. However, when I hit the letter, it gives me all the members starting with that letter, instead of just the ones meeting the search criteria. I would need to put in the criteria for each letter. Is this a known bug, or is there a patch to change this behaviour? Thanks. Peter Lombrozo Plombrozo(a)veeco.com Software Engineer

1 0

status of search archive feature
by Glenn Burkhardt Oct. 29, 2004

Oct. 29, 2004

I notice that there are patches available to integrate an archive search feature into Mailman, and at least one of the patches (#444884) has been maintained for years over the various versions of Mailman. Is there a plan for adding this incredibly useful feature to Mailman? Why hasn't patch 444884 been incorporated into the code as a supported feature? Thanks.

1 0

Customizing archive page
by Peter Lombrozo Oct. 27, 2004

Oct. 27, 2004

I'm trying to modify the archtocnombox.html page to look more like our company web site. I was able to add in a form for htDig search which worked fine, but when I added a lot of tables and additional information in the page, MM or pipermail quit parsing the embedded variables (e.g.,%(archive_listing_start)s) and leaves them on the page. Is there some trick to get it to this, or does the script lose its mind trying to read in all the extra html and give up? Thanks. Peter Lombrozo plombrozo(a)veeco.com

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Other MTA's
by Phill Thomas Oct. 27, 2004

Oct. 27, 2004

Hi all, I hope this is the right list to be posting too, if not please let me know.... I currently run Communigate Pro on a Xserve running Mac OS 10.3.5, the list server built into Communigate is not brilliant and as such I decided to use Mailman instead. However I now find myself unsure how I can make Mailman use Communigate as the MTA? Or if this is even possible? Any advice or ideas on this would be greatly appreciated. Regards, Phillip Thomas

1 0

We may need to escape percent signs in admin forms
by Tom Neff Oct. 24, 2004

Oct. 24, 2004

I notice that on one of my lists, a moderator had been using the "Add (address) to a sender filter" checkbox on a lot of pending moderator requests, so that a substantial list of automatic-discard addresses had been built *without* ever using the Sender Filters admin page. When I went to the Sender Filters page myself and tried to change something else, the Submit blew up with TypeError: not enough arguments for format string in htmlformat.py . I googled this and on a couple of Python forums I found the suggestion than an un-escaped percent sign had found its way into a template. My templates are untouched but Mailman builds a lot of documents on the fly, so I scanned the pre-submit Sender Filters page source for percents and lo, there were a couple in the list of auto-discard email addresses. On a whim I removed them and re-Submitted. Instant success. I am too swamped to hack the Mailman code right now but if someone wants to take a look, it may be that there is something called addError that is passing un-escaped text. We might want to come in after any template substitution and escape what's left. Or something.

2 2

escape characters for boilerplate messages not working
by Mark Oct. 23, 2004

Oct. 23, 2004

I'm am having trouble putting together a Welcome Message. Using the escape characters for ", &, < and > do not seem to working. I'm getting very odd results whether I try to use the escape characters or not. Not using them results with the escape characters appearing in the delivered message (ie. "&" yields "&"), and using them results in this weird doubling thing (eg." &" yields "&amp;"). Any ideas?? Further, how can I change the text that Mailman automatically appends to the Welcome Message?? Can I set it so that it appends nothing?? For you developers, why doesn't it just use plain text, simply treating text as text?? It is for generating email, not a webpage. RTFM Notice: I have looked through all of the available documents at http://www.gnu.org/software/mailman/ and went through the archives for the last several months. The list and archives at http://listowner.org/ do not seem to be working at this time. THANX!!

2 1

Issue with listinfo.html template
by Mark Sapiro Oct. 22, 2004

Oct. 22, 2004

The following came up on the mailman-users list. ------------ begin quote of my post to mailman-users Matt Singerman wrote: > >I am running an installation of Mailman 2 on an OpenBSD server, running >several mailing lists. The one list in particular I am having problems >with is: > >http://list.mchoralhealth.org/mailman/listinfo/cohp > >The problem is that if you try and view the subscribers' list (which is >open to list members), you are redirected to: > >http://list.mchoralhealth.org/mailman/subscribe/cohp > >Instead of the proper page: > >http://list.mchoralhealth.org/mailman/roster/cohp > >What on earth could be causing this? I am contemplating saving out the >subscribers list and config file, deleting, and recreating the list. >Anyone have any less drastic suggestions? The listinfo.html template for this list has been messed up in editing. When the subscribe stuff was moved to the bottom, the line which becomes <FORM Method=POST ACTION="http://list.mchoralhealth.org/mailman/subscribe/cohp"> in the final page and which probably looks like <MM-Subscribe-Form-Start> in the template needs to be moved down below the other forms on the page. The real problem is that in the standard template, the subscribe form actually begins in the middle of the "About" section instead of within the "Subscribing" section. This leads to exactly the kind of error you made when trying to rearrange things on the page. ------------ end of quote I suggest that the following patch might help people avoid the above error when editing the template. --- mailman-2.1.5/templates/en/listinfo.html 2002-11-15 22:10:36.000000000 -0800 +++ mailman-mas/templates/en/listinfo.html 2004-10-22 12:25:30.000000000 -0700 @@ -26,7 +26,6 @@ <TD COLSPAN="1" WIDTH="100%" BGCOLOR="#FFF0D0"> <MM-lang-form-start><MM-displang-box> <MM-list-langs> <MM-form-end> - <MM-Subscribe-Form-Start> </TD> </TR> <tr> @@ -63,6 +62,7 @@ <P> Subscribe to <MM-List-Name> by filling out the following form. + <MM-Subscribe-Form-Start> <MM-List-Subscription-Msg> <ul> <TABLE BORDER="0" CELLSPACING="2" CELLPADDING="2" Of course, if this is a good idea, it also applies (the idea, not the exact patch) to all the other languages as well. -- Mark Sapiro <msapiro(a)value.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan

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