[Pkg-mailman-hackers] Bug#412340: mailman: upgrade may break archiving

[Lionel Elie Mamane]

Package: release-notes

A mailman issue has come up for the sarge -> etch upgrade which we may
not be able to fix in time for etch (as upstream has been aware of the
issue for more than a year but still hasn't fixed it; we have been
aware of that issue only for a few days). An accurate description of
the current situation is:

 If you upgrade mailman at a moment such that a message with non-ASCII
 encodable subject or sender got archived (i.e. sent to a mailing list
 that is archived with the built-in pipermail) in the current archive
 volume, then after the upgrade new messages will fail to be archived
 with an error like:

 Uncaught runner exception: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xae in position 6: ordinal not in range(128)
 Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib/mailman/Mailman/Queue/Runner.py", line 112, in _oneloop
    self._onefile(msg, msgdata)
  File "/usr/lib/mailman/Mailman/Queue/Runner.py", line 170, in _onefile
    keepqueued = self._dispose(mlist, msg, msgdata)
  File "/usr/lib/mailman/Mailman/Queue/ArchRunner.py", line 73, in _dispose
    mlist.ArchiveMail(msg)
  File "/usr/lib/mailman/Mailman/Archiver/Archiver.py", line 214, in ArchiveMail
    h.processUnixMailbox(f)
  File "/usr/lib/mailman/Mailman/Archiver/pipermail.py", line 580, in processUnixMailbox
    self.add_article(a)
  File "/usr/lib/mailman/Mailman/Archiver/pipermail.py", line 632, in add_article


 If you were keeping both mbox and HTML archives (even if the mbox
 archives were not made available over HTTP), then you can cure that
 issue by regenerating the HTML archives (and current-volume pickle
 database, which is the root of the problem) from scratch with:

 /var/lib/mailman/bin/arch --wipe <listname>

-- 
Lionel