Developers of Sympa

[Peter Farmer <address@concealed>]

Thanks Olivier,

On Monday 20 November 2006 8:35 pm, Olivier Salaün - CRU wrote:
> 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).

this is a problem for me - I need to be able to dump & restore this info 
too. I can write my own script I guess - is there any plan to supply this 
functionality via sympa.pl or wwwsympa ?

> 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 

Thats what I did. It needs a few tweaks 8-). For the record, to fix this 
program you need to add "use List;" to load the List module, and replace 
the direct DBI connection code in with
 
&List:db_connect() || die "Cant connect to database" ;
my $dbh = &List::db_get_handler();
 
It then happily slurps in the dumped database.


> 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.
>

Neither load_subscribers.pl or the --import option allows 
db_additional_user_fields to be restored to the database. Obviously this is 
because the --dump option doesn't export them. It would be very useful if 
the upcoming sympa.pl dumps the additional user fields and imports them if 
the current config file enumerates them . I am adding this feature to my 
own installation, and will at some point submit the changes if someone has 
not already done something similar ...

> > 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.

My apologies - there is some documentation re format - in section 8.5. It 
would be a good idea to duplicate that info or link to from the running 
sympa section (4.1) where the --import command is introduced.

Regards,

Peter Farmer