[Savannah-hackers-public] Re: Mailman upgrade

[Karl Berry]

Hi Sylvain,

Yes, as I mentioned in previous messages, Bob Proulx and I have spent
some time looking at the huge collection of pending messages.  info-cvs
is by far the worst.

We cleaned up the scheme lists after Chris Hanson, the moderator,
replied to one of my initial queries about it.  In doing that, I found
that mailman's discard command did not work well.  The lists' dbs got
corrupted and even the (few) real messages were not visible (I resent
them manually).

On the other hand, just rm'ing the files didn't work well either; then
the msgs were still visible in the pending queue, albeit with some
information missing.  However, doing that will at least clean up the
directory, so maybe it is the way to go for now.  The only alternative I
can think of is to run them through Bob's system and generate a discard
message for each.

I didn't realize there were deleted lists.  I see no reason not to
delete anything pending for a delete list right away.  That can only
help.

As for the pending msgs on active lists, perhaps the most expedient
thing to do is save a copy of everything and then just delete everything
older than N months with whatever method you want to try.  Perhaps try
N=6 and see if that makes the number more manageable?  And then set it
up to happen via cron to avoid things building up again.

I have never had any luck engaging sysadmin on this issue.  It's good to
keep them informed, of course, but I wouldn't wait around for them to
actually do anything.

What we really need to do is recruit more moderators, but I haven't had
a lot of success in that area either.

Thanks,
Karl