[Mailman-Developers] Re: [Mailman-Users] mailman, postifx, and bsdos3

[Barry A. Warsaw]

>>>>> "GME" == George M Ellenburg <gmelists@caffeine.sundial.net> writes:

    GME> At the request of some of my customers, I've recently
    GME> installed mailman on BSD 3.1, with Postfix beta-19990317-pl02
    GME> as the transport.

    GME> Frankly, I'm a little confused with regards to the install
    GME> instructions.  Was wondering if anyone can provide some
    GME> elightenment.

    GME> I'm getting the following error when trying to create a test list:

    | sundial:~/bin $ whoami
    | mailman
    | sundial:~/bin $ ./newlist
    | Enter the name of the list: test
    | Enter the email of the person running the list: gme@caffeine.sundial.net
    | Initial test password: testpassword
    | Traceback (innermost last):
    |   File "./newlist", line 141, in ?
    |     raise SystemExit(main(sys.argv))
    |   File "./newlist", line 91, in main
    |     newlist.Create(list_name, owner_mail, pw)
    |   File "/u1/mailman/Mailman/MailList.py", line 658, in Create
    |     self.Lock()
    |   File "/u1/mailman/Mailman/MailList.py", line 1213, in Lock
    |     self._lock_file.lock('w|', 1)
    |   File "/usr/local/lib/python1.5/posixfile.py", line 190, in lock
    |     flock = fcntl.fcntl(self._file_.fileno(), cmd, flock)
    | IOError: (22, 'Invalid argument')
    | sundial:~/bin $

I'm Cc'ing the Mailman developers and Guido on this message, because I 
suspect there's a problem with your Python on your operating system
(BSD 3.1).  For some reason lock() method on the posixfile object is
failing.  This method eventually calls down to fcntl() and the `|'
modifier translates to F_SETLKW.  fcntl(2) says that this could fail
and return EINVAL (i.e. errno 22) as described in my Solaris manpage:

     EINVAL         The cmd argument is invalid; or the cmd argu-
                    ment  is  F_DUPFD  and  arg  is  negative  or
                    greater than or equal to OPEN_MAX; or the cmd
                    argument   is  F_GETLK,  F_GETLK64,  F_SETLK,
                    F_SETLK64, F_SETLKW, or  F_SETLKW64  and  the
                    data  pointed  to  by  arg  is  not valid; or
                    fildes refers to a file that does not support
                    locking.

I've never seen this happen before, at least in the context of
Mailman, so that's why I'm suspecting your OS, of which I have no
experience.   What does your sys.platform say?  Maybe someone else has 
some idea about why this is failing.

-Barry