Developers of Sympa

[Peter Farmer<address@concealed>]

I am using Sympa 5.2.1, though the functionality in 5.2.3 seems to be the same
.

The --dump option to sympa.pl creates a text dump of the subscription database
for a given list using a multiline format seperated by empty lines, which 
seems
to be the format required by the load_subscribers.pl script. However the 
format
required by the --import option of  sympa.pl is quite different - it appears 
to
require single line records format that contain only the email address and
gecos field (name). 

It seems inconsistent and confusing to me that  the import option should'nt be
capable of importing a subscriber database dumped by its  sibling dump option,
but the stand alone load_subscribers utility does. Wouldnt it make more sense 
if the load_subscribers.pl script handled the non native import formats ?

More importantly the current  documentation does not explain what input format
is required for the --import option.

On a related note, load_subscribers.pl does not create the robot_subscriber
field content which is required for the imported entry to be a working
subscriber record . This appears to be a bug - or am i missing some step in 
the
process of importing users ?

Is there an option to dump the user database to a text database like --dump
does for a given lists subscribers ?

Whats the easiest/best way to completely remove users from Sympa (expunged 
from
both the subscribers and users databases ) ?

 
Thanks

Peter Farmer