Barry Finkel wrote:

I am running a home-built Mailman 2.1.9 Ubuntu package with the latest security patch. I see messages in the error log like this one:

Apr 25 08:00:05 2008 (27326) IOError reading list extension:
  [Errno 20] Not a directory:
  '/var/lib/mailman/lists/append_description.newdescription/extend.py'

I do not see any

extend.py

in the directory in which I build Mailman.

Is 'append_description.newdescription' the name of a list?

This error occurs when Mailman attempts to read (actually execute) the optional extend.py module for a list during the instantiation of that list, and it gets an error exception other than 'doesn't exist'.

From the actual error, it seems that /var/lib/mailman/lists/append_description.newdescription is not a directory. Is it a file?

There should be nothing in /var/lib/mailman/lists/ except subdirectories corresponding to lists, but Mailman shouldn't really care.

It's hard to tell without more information, but it looks like this comes from cron/checkdbs which trys to instantiate every list. It should only be trying to instantiate lists whose names are the names of subdirectories of /var/lib/mailman/lists/ and which subdirectories in turn contain a config.pck file, but something might be wrong with Mailman.Utils.list_names() (or Mailman.Site.get_listnames() or Mailman.Utils.list_exists() called by list_names()) that causes it to return the bogus name.

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