Forrest Aldrich wrote:

The problem was an obscure typo in mm_cfg.py. Missing single quotes, basically. It's "obscure" because it wasn't very obvious... and I looked over everything with a fine-toothed comb, including our proxy and httpd setup!

It seems to me that Mailman could probably provide better debugging output in this scenario. I don't know Python, but at the point where the mm_cfg.py file is parsed, any syntactical errors could be reported then. ?

The real issue here seems to be that the import from mm_cfg done in the driver script is inadequately protected. The driver script print_traceback definition contains

try:
    from Mailman.mm_cfg import VERSION
except ImportError:
    VERSION = '<undetermined>'

This is fine if there is an ImportError exception, but since mm_cfg.py is edited by users, it is possible (likely) that there will be a SyntaxError error exception here, and something more meaningful than the "Mailman experienced a very low level failure and could not even generate a useful traceback for you." message could be reported.

-- Mark Sapiro <msapiro@value.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan