On Sun, Mar 15, 2026 at 10:31 AM Thomas Krichel <krichel@openlib.org> wrote:
I am very sorry to you folks for not getting back on the problems I am having to install on Debian testing. There are two reasons. One is that I have been much offline for personal reasons. The other is that I have another machine called tagol where I have been running Mailman3 for about three years, using the Debian packet on Debian testing. As testing move to 3.13 this installation could not run. I replaced mailman-core with a 3.12 venv install, but left the mailman3-web package of Debian. This half-arsed job held up for a long time but two weeks ago collapsed. No email went through. I have been trying to switch to a full venv version, still staying with 3.12.
Tagol hosts a single list
mailman@tagol:~$ mailman lists 1 matching mailing lists found: bibnez@folks.email
I have some bad queue files. Let's look at the oldest
mailman@tagol:~$ ls -lt /var/lib/mailman3/queue/bad/ | tail -1 -rw-rw---- 1 mailman mailman 8579 Mar 11 14:32 1773239548.2417333+451b61b8707218b4dc3d0864eb4ee0172bd21d71.psv
Write a script "test_bad" to submit this back.
mailman@tagol:~$ cat test_bad #!/bin/bash
base=/var/lib/mailman3/queue/bad/1773239548.2417333+451b61b8707218b4dc3d0864eb4ee0172bd21d71 psv=$base.psv pck=$base.pck
cp $psv $pck mailman unshunt mailman@tagol:~$
When I run this script, I get in my log
Mar 15 05:40:46 2026 (2658932) <a930211e778a4aa0829cee5b2a9e7db9@kbs-mg.de
runner "in" shunting message for missing list: <object object at 0x7fb1ad1ad730>
I suspect mailman does not see the database. But
mailman@tagol:~$ mailman info | grep -v credent GNU Mailman 3.3.10 (Tom Sawyer) Python 3.12.9 (main, Feb 5 2025, 01:31:18) [GCC 14.2.0] config file: /etc/mailman3/mailman.cfg db url: sqlite:////var/lib/mailman3/data/mailman.db devmode: DISABLED REST root url: http://localhost:8001/3.1/
The file exists
mailman@tagol:~$ ls -l /var/lib/mailman3/data/mailman.db -rw-rw---- 1 mailman mailman 4825088 Mar 15 05:20 /var/lib/mailman3/data/mailman.db
I have no idea where to look next.
Thanks and cheers!
MM3 with Sqlite is not recommended for production. The virtualenv HOWTO even doesn't mention it. So ideally, you should be using PostgreSQL or MariaDB. In a production setup, the MM3 core and Django config files should ideally reside in /etc/mailman3/ The output of the command 'mailman info' should show "config file: /etc/mailman3/mailman.cfg". with db_url pointing to an officially supported RDBM. That will tell you that MM3 is reading the expected config. Mixing-and-match of virtualenv and OS package install will lead to lots of pain chasing ghosts - as you can already see. Having said that, let's say your choice is sqlite as the DB, does your list exist in the DB?
Run this command from the DB and show output: select id, list_id from mailinglist;
-- Best regards, Odhiambo WASHINGTON, Nairobi,KE +254 7 3200 0004/+254 7 2274 3223 In an Internet failure case, the #1 suspect is a constant: DNS. "Oh, the cruft.", egrep -v '^$|^.*#' ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ :-) [How to ask smart questions: http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html]