[Mailman-Users] Auto-approval patch (was: Uncaught runnerexception: regular_exclude_lists)

[Mark Sapiro]

Adam Nielsen wrote:
>
>>> Also, rather than incrementing Version.DATA_FILE_VERSION further and
>>> setting yourself up for this kind of problem again, you could leave it
>>> at 97 and run the following (after applying the auto approval patch)
>>> to make sure all lists get updated
>>>
>>> #!/bin/sh
>>> f=`mktemp`
>>> echo "mlist.data_version = 96" >$f
>>> for list in `/path/to/bin/list_lists --bare`; do
>>>   /path/to/bin/config_list -i $f $list
>>> done
>>> rm $f
>> 
>> Excellent, I applied the patch (had to do some bits manually because of
>> indentation changes), ran your script and now everything's working
>> perfectly!
>
>And I have now upgraded Mailman again to 2.1.13 and reapplied the 
>auto-approval patch, however I am not sure whether I need to do anything 
>with version numbers.  Since the data_version was 97 before the patch, 
>and now there's new configuration values, should I run the above code or 
>not?  It looks like the code resets the version back to an old number, 
>so presumably Mailman upgrades the list when it next accesses it, but 
>because the list is already at 97 I'm worried that if I reset it back to 
>96 I might lose some data.
>
>Can anyone let me know what (if anything) I need to do?


The short answer is you need to run config_list with the
"mlist.data_version = 96" input on only those lists which you created
with Mailman 2.1.13 before you applied the patch. Probably this is no
lists so you don't need to do anything.

The long answer is the patch adds a new list attribute
subscribe_auto_approval. Lists created without the patch do not have
this attribute, and this will cause exceptions when the attribute is
referenced by the patched code.

Mailman has a mechanism for updating old list configurationson the fly
and adding missing attributes and in cases like upgrading 2.0 to 2.1
even refactoring old attributes into new ones. This mechanism is
triggered by the list's data_version being less than the current
schema. So setting the data_version of a list to 96 when the current
schema is 97 will cause Mailman to invoke the versions.py updating
process on the list the next time it is loaded.

In your case, this will do no harm, but it isn't necessary unless you
have a list or lists that were created without the patch and not
previously updated.

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