Re: [Mailman-Users] "IOError reading list extension" Message

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.
And Mark Sapiro replied:
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'.
The three files in the /var/lib/mailman/lists directory
append_description.newdescription
append_description.description
append_description.configfile
were created when I was testing a script to add "{category}" to the description field of each Mailman list. I am not sure how they got there, as my script was running from my home directory. I have deleted them. Since these three files are not Mailman lists, which Mailman process that was treating them as list names is not important.
We find the Mailman "home" page (i.e., listinfo) not user-friendly, as it lists all of the advertised lists in alphabetical order. We have about 80 advertised lists. We want the lists sorted by category, so I wrote a script to append "{category}" to each list description. I have defined eighteeen different "{category}" strings, and we are working on generating a new listinfo page with the lists sorted by category. The plan is to
1) Make "listinfo.original" point to the Mailman-generated page.
2) Have the new "listinfo" page use the "listinfo.original" page
to extract the advertised list names and descriptions.
A new list of lists page will be displayed using the category
strings at the send of each list's "description" field and an
external file that describes the various category strings.
Barry S. Finkel Computing and Information Systems Division Argonne National Laboratory Phone: +1 (630) 252-7277 9700 South Cass Avenue Facsimile:+1 (630) 252-4601 Building 222, Room D209 Internet: BSFinkel@anl.gov Argonne, IL 60439-4828 IBMMAIL: I1004994

Barry Finkel wrote:
Since these three files are not Mailman lists, which Mailman process that was treating them as list names is not important.
It's important to me. I would like to understand why the name of a file in the lists/ directory is being returned (apparently by Utils.list_lists()) as a list name, because this isn't supposed to happen (and I can't make it happen in my test installation).
-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
participants (2)
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b19141@anl.gov
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Mark Sapiro