[Mailman-Users] "IOError reading list extension" Message

[Mark Sapiro]

Barry Finkel wrote:

>I am running a home-built Mailman 2.1.9 Ubuntu package with the latest
>security patch.  I see messages in the error log like this one:
>
>     Apr 25 08:00:05 2008 (27326) IOError reading list extension:
>       [Errno 20] Not a directory:
>       '/var/lib/mailman/lists/append_description.newdescription/extend.py'
>
>I do not see any
>
>     extend.py
>
>in the directory in which I build Mailman.


Is 'append_description.newdescription' the name of a list?

This error occurs when Mailman attempts to read (actually execute) the
optional extend.py module for a list during the instantiation of that
list, and it gets an error exception other than 'doesn't exist'.

>From the actual error, it seems that
/var/lib/mailman/lists/append_description.newdescription is not a
directory. Is it a file?

There should be nothing in /var/lib/mailman/lists/ except
subdirectories corresponding to lists, but Mailman shouldn't really
care.

It's hard to tell without more information, but it looks like this
comes from cron/checkdbs which trys to instantiate every list. It
should only be trying to instantiate lists whose names are the names
of subdirectories of /var/lib/mailman/lists/ and which subdirectories
in turn contain a config.pck file, but something might be wrong with
Mailman.Utils.list_names() (or Mailman.Site.get_listnames() or
Mailman.Utils.list_exists() called by list_names()) that causes it to
return the bogus name.

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