[Mailman-Users] Low level bug: (solved)

[Mark Sapiro]

Forrest Aldrich wrote:
>
>The problem was an obscure typo in mm_cfg.py.   Missing single quotes, 
>basically.  It's "obscure" because it wasn't very obvious... and I 
>looked over everything with a fine-toothed comb, including our proxy and 
>httpd setup!
>
>It seems to me that Mailman could probably provide better debugging 
>output in this scenario.   I don't know Python, but at the point where 
>the mm_cfg.py file is parsed, any syntactical errors could be reported 
>then.   ?

The real issue here seems to be that the import from mm_cfg done in the
driver script is inadequately protected. The driver script
print_traceback definition contains

    try:
        from Mailman.mm_cfg import VERSION
    except ImportError:
        VERSION = '<undetermined>'

This is fine if there is an ImportError exception, but since mm_cfg.py
is edited by users, it is possible (likely) that there will be a
SyntaxError error exception here, and something more meaningful than
the "Mailman experienced a very low level failure and could not even
generate a useful traceback for you." message could be reported.

--
Mark Sapiro <msapiro at value.net>       The highway is for gamblers,
San Francisco Bay Area, California    better use your sense - B. Dylan