[Mailman-Developers] 2.0.14 -> 2.1.5 and pending requests

[Terri Oda]

On Aug 30, 2004, at 7:39 PM, mjinks at uchicago.edu wrote:
> Ugh: we have, at last count, 2,459 lists.  Many are inactive and could
> probably be culled, but even so, there's no way I could go through all
> those request files by hand during an acceptable amount of downtime.
> Even if I could, they're not my lists; I can't make decisions for the
> list owners about administrative requests for their lists, and there's
> no way I'll be able to get all the list owners to clean out their
> requests without more flowing in.  So if we really do have to have all
> the request files empty before an upgrade, there's no way we'll be able
> to upgrade.

Well, the alternative is to write (or commission someone else to write) 
the conversion script... I just don't think one's been written yet.  
(And I'd be happy to be proven wrong on this.)

What you'd need to do is find out what data's stored in your current 
request pickles (.pck files), find out what data is stores in the newer 
pickles, and convert from one to the other, using default values for 
any additional fields (eg: the "real name" field which has been added 
to the user subscription requests).

Using python, it should be easy enough to unpickle the requests and see 
what's in them, and it shouldn't actually be that hard to build new 
request pickles from the old.  The only real problem is that getting it 
all right is likely to be time-consuming work.  (Which is why it's 
easier for many people to just clear the queues.)  I'd guess it'd take 
maybe a couple of days for someone who didn't mind sifting through the 
source and the pickles to see what's what.

So... how's your python?