Developers of Sympa

[Olivier Salaün - CRU <address@concealed>]

Peter Farmer wrote:

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. 

The --dump option saves the list members using Sympa's old native format for list members. It contains the email addresses, member names but also members reception and visibility modes. Note that users "global" preferences are not saved (password, preferred language).
Note that we've very recently removed the load_subscribers.pl from CVS because it was not maintained anymore. We'll probably add an equivalent sympa.pl option. In the meanwhile, you can either fix load_subscribers.pl OR transfer list members as follows :

1. dump address@concealed
2. copy subscribers.db.dump on new.server as ~sympa/expl/myList/subscribers
3. edit list config and set 'user_data_source' to 'file'
4. change this parameter to 'include2' from the admin web interface. It will automatically load list members from the subscribers file to the database.

Of course this process is not well adapted to bulk processing for many lists.

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 ?
  

As I wrote above, sympa.pl will do both, as we get time to code it.

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

We'll complete the documentation. Thanks for reporting this lack.

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 ) ?