[Tutor] dumping .pck files

[Patric Michael]

> 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?

In the bin directory, find the script called "config_list".  From the help file 
(./config_list --help):

 --outputfile filename
    -o filename
        Instead of configuring the list, print out a list's configuration
        variables in a format suitable for input using this script.  In this
        way, you can easily capture the configuration settings for a
        particular list and imprint those settings on another list.  filename
        is the file to output the settings to.  If filename is `-', standard
        out is used.

Dont forget to supply the list name in the command line.  
For example:

config_list -o outfile.txt mylist 

Patric




> 
> Are there other serialization options that would make this easier?
> 
> Many thanks,
> 
> Neal McBurnett                 http://bcn.boulder.co.us/~neal/
> Signed and/or sealed mail encouraged.  GPG/PGP Keyid: 2C9EBA60
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