[Mailman-developers] More mailman locking issues

[Ken Manheimer]

Another issue with mailman locking - i think it's coarse grained, and
needs to be refined.  For example, this morning someone noticed that
the umbrella listinfo page on python.org was hanging, because, it
turns out, one of the lists was left in a locked state.  (Not sure how
that happened - it usually doesn't.)  Well, the umbrella listinfo (and
admin) pages open the lists only for the sake of determining which are
public ones - no writing is actually required, so a lock isn't really
required.

It might be sufficient to offer a way to open a list "read-only", such
that no locking is done.  I think it would be better, however, to
refine the locking system such that lists are not locked until they
enter an operation that changes the list data in a way that will
eventually need to be written.  This would probably take a more effort
than a "read-only" kluge, but may not be too bad.

I guess this is one for the todo list.  (Wish i had gobs of time to
continue to hack on a these sorts of things - they're not very big or
hard, but there is a bunch of them, and they need to be done right.)

Ken