Signed patch against 2.0.1

[Todd Zullinger]

Werner Koch wrote:
> Basically I am the list owner :-(.

Good grief man, your head must hurt from all those hats. :)

I've spent a good bit of time hanging around the mailman-users list
and managing a few smaller lists for others.  I would be glad to try
and help figure out what list settings could be tweaked to get the
archives into better shape.  It should be doable as I've seen and sent
pgp signed (mime and inline) message that included attachments and the
pipermail archiver handled them alright.  There was a bug fixed in
2.1.8 that would scrub some parts of pgp/mime messages with
attachments, but even that one left the main message body intact for
the archives.

I believe I found the culprit that has scrubbed your last few signed
patch mails in the archives.  It seems that since the mime parts lack
a content-type: text/plain header, Mailman's scrubber removes them.  I
think this is probably a bug in the scrubber module, as the MIME RFC
states that messages lacking such a header should be assumed
text/plain.  I've sent a query to mailman-users to see if others
agree[2].  If so, hopefully that can be fixed without too much hassle.

I setup a test list on my box and twiddled with your initial post in
this thread.  All that was required to get it to archive was the
attached diff.  Perhaps you can convince Gnus to include the
content-type headers as a work-around to the mailman archive problem?

> I already installed a new version of Mailman and tried to rebuild
> it.  However it mixed up the numbers and thus most existing URLs
> won't be correct anymore.

Yeah, that's a very unfortunate limitation of the archiver.  Its
weaknesses were just discussed on mailman-users the other day with
main dev Barry Warsaw saying[1]:

    Have I mentioned recently how long I've been looking for a
    volunteer  to help make all this not suck?  ;}  Pipermail is just
    one of those  things that people either live with or ditch.

While it would be bad to have to rebuild and break external links into
the archives, I think it'd be worth it as some of the most valuable
messages in the archives are those that you or any other GnuPG
developer send announcing a problem and attaching a patch.

> Recently I had another issue.  Pipermail break the message if it
> sees a ">From " at the beginning of a line.  I also had to resort to
> manual editing.

Another icky problem caused by older versions of the python email
module which Mailman uses.  Anything since Python 2.3 should include
an email module that defaults to escaping such From_ lines.  So once
the mbox is edited to correct the old, unescaped From_ lines it
shouldn't happen again.

>> BTW, I really like your Content-Type boundary string. :)
> 
> A gadget posted to the Gnus list some years ago:

Very nice.  Some cold and rainy day I may have to add something
similar to my mutt setup.

[1] http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/msg42504.html
[2] http://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-users/2006-December/054904.html

-- 
Todd        OpenPGP -> KeyID: 0xBEAF0CE3 | URL: www.pobox.com/~tmz/pgp
======================================================================
In God we trust. Everybody else we verify using PGP!
    -- Tim Newsome

-------------- next part --------------
--- wk-orig	2006-12-08 11:43:53.000000000 -0500
+++ wk-munged	2006-12-08 11:46:11.000000000 -0500
@@ -42,6 +42,7 @@
 Lines: 294
 
 --=KGB-Sundevil-gamma-Skipjack-government-Vince-Foster-Treasury-bce-S-B
+Content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
 
 Hi!
 
@@ -55,6 +56,7 @@
 
 
 --=KGB-Sundevil-gamma-Skipjack-government-Vince-Foster-Treasury-bce-S-B
+Content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
 Content-Disposition: inline; filename=filter-context-20-small.diff
 Content-Description: Patch against 2.0.1
 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 542 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : /pipermail/attachments/20061208/00aec1b4/attachment.pgp