[Mailman-Users] mailman violates RFC 1153?

[Jonathan Kamens]

On 11/07/2011 10:24 PM, Mark Sapiro wrote:
> Jonathan Kamens wrote:
>> He sent me a sample digest, which ends like this:
>>
>>     ------------------------------
>>
>>     --
>>     test mailing list
>>     test at lists.fedoraproject.org
>>     https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/test
>>
>>     End of test Digest, Vol 93, Issue 20
>>     ************************************
>>
>> RFC 1153 has this to say about the digest trailer (emphasis added by me):
> [...]
>> I looked at the mailman source code and it doesn't appear that the
>> Fedora Project is running a hacked version; it appears that the standard
>> Mailman source code inserts the list footer as shown above as part of
>> the digest trailer, in violation of the RFC.
>
> And if you looked at the source, you should have seen the following
> comment immediately preceding the adding of the footer.
>
> # BAW: This is not strictly conformant RFC 1153.  The trailer is only
> # supposed to contain two lines, i.e. the "End of ... Digest" line and
> # the row of asterisks.  If this screws up MUAs, the solution is to
> # add the footer as the last message in the RFC 1153 digest.  I just
> # hate the way that VM does that and I think it's confusing to users,
> # so don't do it unless there's a clamor.
LOL. Yes, I was looking right at that section of code, and my eyes just 
glossed right over the comment because my brain knew exactly what the 
code in question was doing and therefore saw no need to read the 
comments documenting it. D'oh.

>> I can and will work around this violation of the standard in my code,
>> but it makes the code significantly more complicated, and it's kind of
>> annoying to see the RFC being violated like this.
>
> If you are intending to raise a clamor, you can file a bug report at
> <https://bugs.launchpad.net/mailman/+filebug>.
I have raised as much of a clamor as I intended to. "I just hate the way 
that VM does that" is not in my mind a legitimate reason to violate the 
RFC. If you agree, then you can create your own bug report and fix it. 
If you disagree, then there's no point in my creating one.
> Suppose the above were changed to
>
>       ------------------------------
>
>       Digest-Footer:
>
>       --
>       test mailing list
>       test at lists.fedoraproject.org
>       https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/test
>
>       ------------------------------
>
>       End of test Digest, Vol 93, Issue 20
>       ************************************
>
> Would your code handle that or would it complain the Digest-Footer: is
> not an allowable header and/or none of Date:, From:, To:, Cc:,
> Subject:, Message-ID: and Keywords: were included?
My code would have handled that without complaint.
> What if it were just
>
>       ------------------------------
>
>
>       --
>       test mailing list
>       test at lists.fedoraproject.org
>       https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/test
>
>       ------------------------------
>
>       End of test Digest, Vol 93, Issue 20
>       ************************************
I think it would have handled that without complaint as well... The 
second blank line after the line of hyphens would have been interpreted 
as the terminating line after an empty header.

Note that I say "would have handled" in both of these cases because I've 
already modified my code to accommodate the non-complaint Mailman 
functionality. I would have to do that regardless of whether you fixed 
Mailman to be compliant now, because such a fix would not make it out to 
a substantial majority of Mailman sites for several years, even if you 
released it today.

Thanks for the reply.

   jik