[Mailman-Users] Re Problems with "more info" Hyperlink from ListArchives Page

[Barry Finkel]

Barry Finkel wrote:

>>I wrote, in part,
>>
>>>>...
>>>>I have 13 lists.  For each list I checked the URL chains from the
>>>>
>>>>     https://lists.example.com/mailman/listinfo
>>>>
>>>>Mailman "home page", and for five of the lists I see URL problems.
>>>>
>>>>...
>>>>
>>>>Note that the Mailman list archives page lacks a "/" between "mailman"
>>>>and "listinfo".  For each of these bad lists I ran
>>>>
>>>>     /usr/lib/mailman/bin/withlist -l -r fix_url $list -u lists.example.com
>>>>
>>>>but there were no changes to the URLs.
>>>>...
>>
>>and "Richard Rae" <Richard_Rae at xyratex.com> replied:
>>
>>>You might need to run the fix_url command
>>>
>>>~/bin/withlist -l -r fix_url listname
>>
>>Is this any different than the command I ran?  I tried the
>>
>>     fix_url
>>
>>command without the
>>
>>     -u lists.example.com
>>
>>parameter, and the URLs did not change.

and Mark Sapiro replied:

>Yes, it is different, but that is not the current problem (or maybe it
>was, but more on that in a paragraph).
>
>The -u option sets the url_host in case that list's url_host is
>different from DEFAULT_URL_HOST, which I gather in your case it is not.
>
>Here's what I think the issue is. When you originally changed
>DEFAULT_URL_PATTERN for the https scheme you left off the trailing
>slash and added cgi-bin/as in
>
>DEFAULT_URL_PATTERN = 'https://%s/cgi-bin/mailman'
>(when the 'mailman' list was created)
>
>also, apparently at some point you had other things like
>
>DEFAULT_URL_PATTERN = 'https://%s/cgi-bin/mailman/'
>(bad3 through bad 6)
>and
>
>DEFAULT_URL_PATTERN = 'https://%s/'
>(bad2)
>
>
>You later corrected that to
>
>DEFAULT_URL_PATTERN = 'https://%s/mailman/'
>
>and (perhaps later still) ran fix_url which fixed the hidden
>web_page_url attribute on these six lists.
>
>However, the archive pages are static HTML pages. Current index and TOC
>pages are constantly rebuilt as messages are added to the archives,
>but pages that haven't been updated since before you ran fix_url will
>have bad links as you observe.
>
>There are a few ways to fix this. The easiest is to run 'bin/arch
>--wipe' on all the problem lists, but if these lists have archives
>going back to older Mailman versions (I'm not sure how old is a
>problem, but maybe 2.0.x, maybe pre 2.1.4), there are some potential
>issues in that there may be unescaped "From " lines in message bodies
>that are taken as mbox message separators by the archiver
>(bin/cleanarch can help find/fix these). Also, there is a possibility
>that messages may get renumbered in the archive which is not a problem
>in itself, but it invalidates any saved URLs linking to individual
>archive messages.
>
>If you don't want to run 'bin/arch --wipe' you can ignore the problem.
>The main TOC page and the current period's index pages should get
>fixed the next time a message is archived for the list, and new index
>pages will be built correctly. If older index pages are a concern,
>they can be edited with a script.

Mark has a correct diagnosis.  I went back through my records, and
I did have different

     DEFAULT_URL_HOST

values when I created these test lists.  Each list was created with
Mailman 2.1.9, so for most of the lists, sending another test posting
to the list corrected the archive URL.

I did not run

     bin/arch --wipe

because I did not need to, and also I was unsure of the proper
parameters.  I also did not have time to look for the man page.
I know that when I convert a Majordomo list to Mailman, I have to run

     /usr/lib/mailman/bin/arch --wipe $LISTNAME majordomolist.mbox

after creating the majordomolist.mbox file from the Majordomo list
archives.  On my Ubuntu system

     man arch

displays the man page for

     arch - print machine architecture

One thing that

     fixurl

did that I was not expecting was to change

     host_name

back to the default in one test list where I had set it to another
nodename for testing.  But re-setting this parameter was easy to do
via the admin web interface.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Barry S. Finkel
Computing and Information Systems Division
Argonne National Laboratory          Phone:    +1 (630) 252-7277
9700 South Cass Avenue               Facsimile:+1 (630) 252-4601
Building 222, Room D209              Internet: BSFinkel at anl.gov
Argonne, IL   60439-4828             IBMMAIL:  I1004994