Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 1999/06/05
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]Dear Leica-Users subscribers, It took a couple of days, but I have found and repaired the problem that was causing some digests not to be sent. Here is what happened. For quite some time, the Leica digests had been festooned with an extra Topics in this digest: _SUBJECTS_ at the beginning. This was an annoyance, but only a minor one, so I let it go for a long time. On May 20, I finally figured out what was causing those extra lines, and I changed it. The problem was that the Leica mailing list was being routed through the Digest processor twice, and the second pass through found only one message, the Digest itself, and so did not generate a list of subjects to replace the token _SUBJECTS_. I changed the distribution table so that it routed through the digest processor only once, and checked my notes to see if I had recorded a reason for setting it up that way in the first place. I had not written anything down, so I assumed it was a mistake. But: about a year ago, the Leica list was given a limit that no individual message could be bigger than a certain size. But digests must be immune to that size limit, because they are combinations of many messages. In routing the messages past the digest processor, I had activated the "this is not a digest, so it must be subject to a size limit" logic. I think that is probably a latent bug in the majordomo software and not anything I did wrong, but the end result is the same. When a digest is generated by having the waiting-list overflow, during the middle of the day, the software is smart enough to know that it is not supposed to do this checking, but when a digest is generated by the clock, at midnight California time, the software made the digest and then checked to see if it was small enough to send. In many cases it was not. I have modified the majordomo software so that it no longer makes this check. I won't know for sure that this fix is working until tonight, since only the clock-triggered digests are failing, but I'm confident enough that this is the problem that I am announcing its repair. Those of you who subscribe to the digest will know that I have just send the last 5 missing digests to all digest subscribers. I'm not going to go back in time any farther than that. If you want older digests, you will need to request them from the archives. Here is how to request a digest from the archives. Send an email message To: majordomo@mejac.palo-alto.ca.us Subject: get leica-users-digest v09.n004 get leica-users-digest v09.n005 and so forth. Here is the complete list of digests that were not sent, and that I have not already retransmitted: get leica-users-digest v09.001 get leica-users-digest v09.004 get leica-users-digest v09.005 get leica-users-digest v09.009 get leica-users-digest v09.011 get leica-users-digest v09.015 get leica-users-digest v09.017 I am thinking about turning off the clock-generated issue of the Leica Users Digest and let the list volume generate all of them. The original purpose of the clock-generated digest was to make sure that digest subscribers got at least one message a day, so that they would not bother me with "am I still on the list?" questions. As I study the logs, I see that on May 22, May 23, May 13, April 27, April 8, and April 7 there would have been intervals of longer than 24 hours without a digest being generated. Brian Reid your Leica Users mailing list operator