As part of proving myself for this Google Summer of Code, I started off with solving a few bugs. I succeeded in solving two bugs today.

The bugs mentioned at the trial bugs page seemed like a good place to start.

1. Bug #348692

This bug was quite easy to fix. But not that easy to locate. Initially I was a bit scared by looking at the description. I started off with my usual grep-ing to search through the code and tried to find the places where welcome_msg is located. I shortened to string to just ‘welcome’ and grep-ped again. One of the results immediately caught my eye. The file was in templates/ and called susbscribeack.txt. This contained the string %(welcome)s in the wrong place. I moved it to the top and it worked. Very easy but fun to see the end result.

Took several iterations of testing via command line mailx tool where I Joined and left the list several times to confirm the result.

2. Bug #514136

This one was more fun in terms of setting up a test environment. It involved testing digest messages. I wouldn’t want to wait whole day for the digest to come to me! Fortunately mailman sends a digest if the mailing list is quite active. But sending so many mails every time when I want to test a change to the code would make it tedious. So I took some time to quickly make an email sending script in Python. I could have done this using the mailx tool, but then I am not very good with shell scripts and I wanted to learn more of Python.

Here is the tiny “Spam” script that I wrote (this is a direct adaptation from the Python documentation on smtplib module):

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#!/usr/bin/env python
 
# Import smtplib for the actual sending function
import smtplib
 
# Import the email modules we'll need
from email.mime.text import MIMEText
 
s = smtplib.SMTP('localhost')
 
i = 0
 
while i < 25:
  # Create a text/plain message
  msg = MIMEText("Message Contents for message number "\
                              + str(i) +  " .")
 
  me = 'priya@localhost.localdomain'
  you = 'test@localhost.localdomain'
 
  msg['Subject'] = 'Message number ' + str(i)
  msg['From'] = me
  msg['To'] = you
 
  s.sendmail(me, [you], msg.as_string())
 
  i = i + 1
 
s.quit()

So this made it easier for me to test. Next I tried to locate the place where this might be happening. Since this was part of a message it made sense to have a look in the templates/ directory. After more grep-ing I located the following text in templates/masthead.txt:

Send %(real_name)s mailing list submissions to
	%(got_list_email)s

Another grep for got_list_email led me to Handlers/ToDigest.py where the action was taking place. I just changed the required code to make it output correctly ('got_list_email': mlist.real_name + "+new@" + mlist.host_name).

That is it. All in all a fun time. Let us see if they are approved by the developers or not. I have my fingers crossed!