[Mailman-Developers] list pickle details

[Barry Warsaw]

On Fri, 2003-12-12 at 16:24, Aaron Bennett wrote:

> My first approach is to unpickle each list's configuration pickle into 
> an array of <whatever the heck they are>.  

That's about the best explanation you're gonna get. <wink>

> Does anyone have either a 
> concise explanation of what's in each list object when it gets 
> unpickled, or a link to some documentation about how mailman's internals 
> work?  Also appreciated would be pointers as to where in the mailman 
> source code I should start my reading.

So basically the config.pck file is a pickled Python dictionary.  This
dictionary is essentially the attributes of the MailList object.  So
anywhere you see self.max_message_size or mlist.description, you're
accessing a MailList attribute.  Unfortunately, the actual use and
semantics of these attributes is not documented anywhere.  You're going
to have to grep the source to figure out where and how each attribute is
used, and what it's values consist of.

Well, maybe.  One thing that may help is the output of bin/config_list. 
Use "bin/config_list -o - mylist" to get a dump of most of the
attributes (the ones that you can set through the web interface).  The
preceding comments should give a good explanation of what the attribute
is used for and what it can contain.

-Barry