[Pkg-mailman-hackers] Bug#421895: Bug#421895: mailman: upgrade fails with UnicodeDecodeError

[Thijs Kinkhorst]

On Wednesday 2 May 2007 12:14, Bernhard Kuemel wrote:
> Mailman remains "not fully installed" and inoperable. It
> does not forward list mail to list members. I have not
> checked if incoming mails are lost. I could not find a
> solution to this issue. I have some German language lists,
> so there may be Umlauts around. Not sure, if the language
> settings on my server are correct/relevant.

The problem here is that mailman tries to automatically convert the 
mailinglist archives to unicode, which is required by newer mailman versions. 
However this appearently fails on some specific character.

As a workaround, you can try to change that specific character by hand in your 
archives and then rerun the installation. Alternatively you can disable the 
running of unicodify_archives in /var/lib/dpkg/info/mailman.postinst.

To fix this properly, I think we should try to find a way to make the 
unicodify_archives script not fail on such errors but rather just continue, 
perhaps with outputting a warning? Lionel?


Thijs