[Mailman-Developers] MM1.0b9 Bug! (was: Setup prob: abs/rel CGI url)

[Harald Meland]

[Christian Tismer]

> Harald Meland wrote:
> > 
> > [Christian Tismer]
> > 
> > > Hi Barry et al,
> > >
> > > I found it - Mailman 1.0b9 has a bug in admin.py .
> > 
> > Which was fixed _days_ ago in CVS :-)
> 
> That's great.
> An average user will step into this trap, since 1.0b9 is the 
> current version. If one always has to check CVS, it makes
> no sense to publish the zip file at all.

On the contrary.  Releasing betas are _part of_ testing new software.

Please understand that I'm not saying that I don't appreciate you
tracking down bugs in Mailman betas -- because I do, really -- but I
thought it appropriate to respond and say that you could get a better
fix for your problem from CVS.

> I have to say: 10.b9 was published without proper testing.

That depends on what you mean by "proper testing".  If "proper
testing" means compiling with all available of the hordes of different
compilers available on lots and lots of OSes with all combinations of
"configure" options, and then doing test runs of all parts of Mailman
with all combinations of web servers, MTAs, Python releases, and
whatnot, there is _no way_ we will get 1.0 out before the end of the
century.

The core developers _do_ typically check that changes they make appear
to work right before they check them in -- but occasionally a bug
slips through.

> Anyway, the "/mailman/anything" strings are a little spread
> around in the sources. In my opinion, it would be safer to
> keep them in a central place (Defaults.py maybe) and just
> use references.

If you have a closer look at the places where /mailman/foobar are
"spread around", I think you will see that they are usually fallbacks
that are only used when the appropriate ways of getting at stuff
doesn't work -- in particular, see the mm_cfg.py variables
`DEFAULT_URL' and `PRIVATE_ARCHIVE_URL'.

In the cases where /mailman/foobar are used as hardcoded values
without any defaults, that is very likely a bug which should be fixed.

Cheers,
-- 
Harald