[bwarsaw@cnri.reston.va.us]

Actually, I just remembered sys.exitfunc! I can set that up to unlock a locked list automatically at interpreter exit. I don't want it to implicitly save the list though -- you'll still have to do that manually if you fiddle with it from the interpreter prompt.

Note that this function doesn't run if the interpreter exits because of a signal or os._exit() call.

Regarding signals: Some time back, I occasionally received reports from my users that some list, while its web admin interface was being accessed, suddenly got unresponsive for a period of time that matched the lock lifetime pretty well. There were no entries/backtraces in logs/error, but I sometimes saw list lock files left lying around, and upon checking their contents found that their creating process was now gone. I suspect this is what happened: * Web browser connects to Mailman. * Web browser for some reason closes its side of the connection before Mailman has given any response. * When Mailman tries to print out its response, it receives a SIGPIPE. I tried fixing the problem with this patch: Index: driver =================================================================== RCS file: /projects/cvsroot/mailman/scripts/driver,v retrieving revision 1.19 diff -u -r1.19 driver --- driver 2000/04/06 19:30:38 1.19 +++ driver 2000/04/12 14:43:23 @@ -89,6 +89,13 @@ main() finally: sys.stderr = sys.__stderr__ + except IOError, e: + import errno + if e.errno == errno.EPIPE: + # Log something + logger.write("EPIPE caught, ARGV=%s\n" % sys.argv) + else: + raise except SystemExit: # this is a valid way for the function to exit pass (Well, something like that patch anyway... :) However, if my understanding of the problem is right, and this is the correct fix for it, I don't understand why the bare except: clause around the run_main() call in driver didn't kick in to produce a log entry... Does anyone have any insight on how to properly avoid SIGPIPEs in python? -- Harald