[Mailman-Developers] Re: odd problem: since MM 2.1 upgrade all links to public listarchives are broken

[Chris Dagdigian]

Replying to my own message since the problem has been fixed and I'd like 
to get the solution into the archives in case any long-time mailman 
users get bitten by the same bug.

We _were_ bitten by cruft hanging around from previous mailman 
installations :)

The culprit was a "mm_cfg.py" file that had not been touched or 
overwritten by a mailman upgrade install since early 2000.

That file contained "old" mailman config settings including this line:
PUBLIC_ARCHIVE_URL = '/pipermail'

This was what was screwing up the URLs to our archives in the listinfo 
HTML.

It seems that (not sure for how long now) much of this stuff is supposed 
to be in Mailman/Defaults.py

Our solution was to blow away mm_cfg.py and replace it with the generic 
mm_cfg.py.disg from the mailman 2.1.1 installer. We then edited 
Mailman/Defaults.py to update our default server name and all is well.


-Chris


Chris Dagdigian wrote:
> 
> Hi mailman developers,
> 
> First off; thanks for a wonderful package. We've been using Mailman for 
> years to keep thousands of open source bioinformatics developers and 
> users in touch with each other.
> 
> Now I've got a problem that seems really odd. I'm a little bit afraid 
> that it may have been caused by some old cruft left over in our mailman 
> dir which has been subjected to many mailman upgrade installs over the 
> years.
> 
> The SMTP/mailman box is a Dec Alpha workstation running Redhat Linux 6.x 
> with python 2.3.
> 
> 
> The problem:
> 
> Since upgrading to Mailman 2.1 (problem persists with MM 2.1.1) all of 
> our mailman list pages that point to the public list archives are broken.
> 
> The URL is presented as "<server>/pipermail/" instead of 
> "<server>/pipermail/<mm-listname>/"
> 
> This prevents our web vistors from getting to our list archives as they 
> are presented with a "you are not allowed to access /pipermail/" error 
> each time.
> 
> We have not changed our templates at all. In fact I blew away the 
> templates directory right before upgrading to 2.1.1.  I've verified in 
> the template HTML that the "MM-List-Name" etc. data seems to be in the 
> right place.
> 
> Here are a couple of example pages with broken links to the public list 
> archives:
> 
> http://bioperl.org/mailman/listinfo/bioperl-l
> http://open-bio.org/mailman/listinfo/moby-l
> 
> The list name is obviously getting substituted into other parts of the 
> page. It's just not getting appended to the end of "/pipermail/" in the 
> URL for the public list archive.
> 
> 
> Private archives work fine. I've taken one list and converted the 
> archives from public->private and the resulting "listinfo" page then 
> produces a perfect link to the private archive.
> 
> 
> Any hints? Has anyone seen this before?
> 
> 
> Regards,
> Chris
> 
> 


-- 
Chris Dagdigian, <dag at sonsorol.org>
BioTeam Inc. - Independent Bio-IT & Informatics consulting
Office: 617-666-6454, Mobile: 617-877-5498, Fax: 425-699-0193
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