Developers of Sympa

[Olivier Salaün - CRU <address@concealed>]

Please submit an official feature request for the --load-subscribers feature and either mention the additional fields issue or provide a patch :
https://sourcesup.cru.fr/tracker/?group_id=23

Note that exporting the user password is out of the scope for --dump.

Thanks.

Peter Farmer wrote:

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