[Mailman-Users] bin/upgrade has been broken since 2.1.5(orpossibly longer)

[Mark Sapiro]

Knut Auvor Grythe wrote:

>On Thu, Sep 18, 2008 at 09:28:32PM -0700, Mark Sapiro wrote:
>> I don't see the need to apply the part of the patch that recovers from
>> the incorect migration. Anyone who migrates with outstanding
>> subscription approval or held message requests from pre 2.1a4 to
>> Mailman through 2.1.11 will encounter the problem and will presumably
>> deal with it somehow before migrating to a still later version.
>
>Well, I didn't. We have a list server with more than 4000 lists on it.
>This is a student system, and students typically disappear after about 5
>years. Sadly, we do not yet have a clean way to tell of lists are dead
>or not (they are often inherited by later students), and thus we have to
>keep them all. 


OK


>About a year ago I upgraded from a lecacy system with mailman
>2.0.something (possibly 2.0.9) to Ubuntu Dapper, thus getting Mailman
>2.1.5. This broke all lists with outstanding subscription requests
>(there were about 10 or 15 of these lists). But apparently nobody used
>these lists any more, and thus nobody reported that the admin requests
>page was broken. 


OK


>This week, when attempting to upgrade further to Ubuntu Hardy, with
>Mailman 2.1.9, the upgrade script crashed as soon as it reached one of
>these lists, without releasing the lock. The attached patch is what I
>used to be able to upgrade cleanly from the previously corrupted data.
>
>Now, I could probably have recovered in some other way, but that's
>because I know python. Not all mailman users do, and I suspect they
>would have severe difficulties recovering from such a situation.


The recovery is something like:

  find lists/*/request.pck -mtime +365 -delete

>Also,
>even if they actually did notice this problem before the upgrade, how
>would they solve it? If I was them I'd probably try to upgrade to the
>latest version to see if the crashing stops, only to see that the
>upgrade also crashes.


I really don't think at this point (11 releases and over 5 years later)
that there are that many people in your situation.

BTW, it seems that given your situation, you may have a large number of
dead held messages. If you haven't done so, you might look at the FAQ
at <http://wiki.list.org/x/nIA9> and remove them.

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