[BALUG-Admin] lot of really nice command-line tools to use in dumping and editing various pck databases

[Michael Paoli]

Ooooh, yes!  I'd be highly interested in such CLI tools/programs.
Any particular pointers on what/where to look for such?
(Debian packages or names or name pattern, or term to search on?)

That will likely come in highly handy pretty darn soon.
I also notice Mailman comes with some stuff to dump such,
haven't yet checked/seen/noticed if it has something to
edit or quite selectively load such (e.g. changes some of
a user's options, but leave others untouched - e.g. won't have
password to reload).

I've got nice web scraping bit (had a wee bit more time this A.M.),
so now I can grab *all* the member data *except* for their password
(and the relatively trivial bit that Mailman also saves their
email as subscriber enters/submits it - which might contain
uppercase letters - but Mailman canonicalizes it to lowercase
and mostly or entirely uses that - though it does also save the original
form).  At least I think that's *all* the data - I'll double-check that
there's nothing else Mailman saves beyond that (at least of
relevance/significance) that's not obtainable from the individual
subscriber settings web pages.  That then also frees us up from
trying to get that data from DreamHost.com (and them possibly mucking
it up or saying "no" anyway).  Also, the data suck from the web pages
is quite "fast enough" - completes typically in under 7 minutes - probably
mostly limited by bandwidth and the number and size of pages.
(800++ members total).  I've a bit more massaging of the data to do, so
it will better align to format to be handed off to go into
format Mailman wants for the Python pickle (.pck) - and that would
presumably be via some handy CLI tools/programs (assuming I can find and
use such) - or "worse case" I might have to learn to write some
Python and Python pickle code to handle it.  In any case, getting
closer to being able to transfer almost all that user preference
data.

> From: "Rick Moen" <rick@linuxmafia.com>
> Subject: Re: [BALUG-Admin] BALUG lists ... blank body with command  
> in Subject: header, ... subscriber options
> Date: Wed, 19 Jul 2017 23:55:03 -0700

> There are a lot of really nice command-line tools available for site
> admins to use in dumping and editing config.db and the various pck
> databases, not limited to those shipped with Mailman.  But of course you
> don't have site admin at Dreamhost.  So, yeah, the most you're going to
> get out of Dreamhost would be for you (or maybe Michael Hubbard) to file
> a trouble ticket asking for the files.  Here's a page about how to do
> migration optimally:
>
> https://debian-administration.org/article/567/Migrating_mailman_lists