[Tutor] dumping .pck files

[Neal McBurnett]

I want to explore some mailman config files, e.g.
config.pck.  Some quick searches informed me that these
contain pickled configuration info.

My first naive attempt to dump what was in them failed:

>>> import pickle
>>> pickle.load(open("config.pck"))
traceback....
ImportError: No module named Mailman.Bouncer

It seems that to do a good job of dumping the data, I need to tell it
what this class looks like.

Are there alternatives?  Does the pickle format really not provide a
way to inspect the data without the class definitions?  E.g. if I
didn't have the source code or didn't want to dig around in it?

Is there a simple way to dump everything it does understand, and
just print stubs for the parts it doesn't?

Or is there some nice software to do this all for me?

Or perhaps does mailman itself have handy command-line tools to aid in
comparing configurations across mailing lists?

Are there other serialization options that would make this easier?

Many thanks,

Neal McBurnett                 http://bcn.boulder.co.us/~neal/
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