[Mailman-Developers] Differences in URL hostname computed for private and public archives

[Tokio Kikuchi]

Hi,

I have just uploaded a patch for this issue.
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=789015&group_id=103&atid=300103


Richard Barrett wrote:

> I am referring to Mailman 2.1.2 in what follows.
> 
> When computing an absolute URL pointing at a list's archives, the 
> computation of the hostname in the URL is performed differently 
> depending on whether the list archives are private or public.
> 
> I cannot spot an obvious reason for why this should be so. I am hoping 
> some kind reader will enlighten me.
> 
> My analysis, in summary:
> 
> 1. The same function GetBaseArchiveURL() in 
> $prefix/Mailman/Archive/Archiver.py is called to deliver the list's 
> archive URL for both public and private list archives.
> 
> 2. Private list archives call subsidiary functions which leads to the 
> FQDN extracted from the list's web_page_url attribute being used to form 
> the required URL.
> 
> 3. Public list archives use the list's host_name attribute and use that 
> perform lookup in an inversion of the mm.cfg.VIRTUAL_HOSTS dictionary to 
> obtain a URL_FQDN to form the required URL. If the lookup fails then the 
> DEFAULT_URL_HOST is used.
> 
> Why the difference in approach?
> 
> A consequence of this approach is that if several different virtual 
> hosts use the same EMAIL_FQDN, which means the VIRTUAL_HOSTS dictionary 
> is a many-one mapping for those virtual hosts' URL_FQDNs, their public 
> list archive base URLs are arbitrarily assigned to just one of those 
> URL_FQDNs.
> 
> This method of computing the URL pointing at a list's archives also 
> seems to interact negatively with a weak aspect of the cPanel 
> (http://http://cpanel.net/) implementation of MM 2.1.2
> 
> cPanel does not appear to maintain (my guess because I do not have 
> access to the source code of their MM related stuff) the 
> mm_cfg.VIRTUAL_HOSTS dictionary and seems to setup the web_page_url and 
> host_name attributes of list created via cPanel without reference to 
> VIRTUAL_HOSTS dictionary. But, as a consequence, when list archives are 
> public the URLs of links to them on the /mailman/listinfo/<listname> and 
> /mailman/admin/<listname> pages use the hosting server's hostname rather 
> than the hosted domain name.
> 
> While it seems that the CPanel implementation of Mailman is partially 
> broken, the URLs generated for MM's CGI prgarams happen to work OK 
> because they are formed from the web_page_url list attribute.
> 
> 
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
> Richard Barrett                               http://www.openinfo.co.uk
> 
> 
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> 
> 

-- 
Tokio Kikuchi, tkikuchi@ is.kochi-u.ac.jp
http://weather.is.kochi-u.ac.jp/