[Pkg-mailman-hackers] Bug#395493: Can't send messages to list

[Lionel Elie Mamane]

(I am not subscribed to mailman-users; please CC me on replies. Please
 also keep the Debian bug entry in the CC list if appropriate.)

(I'm one of the maintainers of the Mailman package in Debian, the
 OS - slash - "GNU/Linux distribution" that Lukasz is using.)

Mark Sapiro wrote:

>Lukasz Szybalski wrote:

>>On 10/24/06, Mark Sapiro <msapiro at value.net> wrote:

>>> We still don't know what causes the timeout. The smtplib debugging
>>> info would help.

>> Where would i find it or how would i get it. Error, smtp,
>> smtp-failure, syslog has only what i have pasted in.

> The patch to SMTPDirect.py which you say you installed causes
> Pythons smtplib to write debugging info to stderr

Not with the version of smtplib Lukasz has (python 2.3). It writes to
stdout. I sent to Lukasz a version of smtplib that writes debugging
info to stderr.

> which in a normal Mailman environment is logged to Mailman's error
> log.

In the version of Mailman that Lukasz uses, not exactly. It is logged
to a MultiLogger which tries to log to Mailman's error log _and_ to
the stderr of the process. Because the process is running as a daemon,
it does not have a stderr and thus writing to stderr fails, which
falls back (through _logexc_) to ... writing to stderr. Which fails,
but this time the exception (invalid file descriptor) is not caught
and Mailman barfs out with a traceback like (I manually patched the
smptlib on that machine to write to stderr instead of stdout):

 Nov 02 15:21:51 2006 (18279) Uncaught runner exception: [Errno 9] Bad file descriptor
Nov 02 15:21:51 2006 (18279) Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib/mailman/Mailman/Queue/Runner.py", line 111, in _oneloop
    self._onefile(msg, msgdata)
  File "/usr/lib/mailman/Mailman/Queue/Runner.py", line 167, in _onefile
    keepqueued = self._dispose(mlist, msg, msgdata)
  File "/usr/lib/mailman/Mailman/Queue/OutgoingRunner.py", line 73, in _dispose
    self._func(mlist, msg, msgdata)
  File "/var/lib/mailman/Mailman/Handlers/SMTPDirect.py", line 166, in process
    conn.quit()
  File "/var/lib/mailman/Mailman/Handlers/SMTPDirect.py", line 93, in quit
    self.__conn.quit()
  File "/usr/lib/python2.3/smtplib.py", line 709, in quit
    self.docmd("quit")
  File "/usr/lib/python2.3/smtplib.py", line 370, in docmd
    self.putcmd(cmd,args)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.3/smtplib.py", line 326, in putcmd
    self.send(str)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.3/smtplib.py", line 310, in send
    if self.debuglevel > 0: print >> sys.stderr, 'send:', `str`
  File "/usr/lib/mailman/Mailman/Logging/MultiLogger.py", line 45, in write
    _logexc(logger, msg)
  File "/usr/lib/mailman/Mailman/Logging/Utils.py", line 22, in _logexc
    sys.__stderr__.write('Logging error: %s\n' % logger)
 IOError: [Errno 9] Bad file descriptor


Looking at the code, this seems to be fixed in Mailman 2.1.9, and I
would assume probably in some earlier versions, too.


Best Regards,

-- 
Lionel