On 7/12/18 7:34 AM, Marvin Gülker wrote:

Hi,

I've just upgraded to Mailman 3.2.0 (finally everything Python 3 now, thanks!) and it appears to work. However, there's a repeating error message in mailman-suite's logfile for Hyperkitty that looks like this:

ERROR 2018-07-12 14:28:33,895 2742 hyperkitty.lib.utils Failed to update the fulltext index: ord() expected a character, but string of length 0 found
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/home/mailman/env3/lib/python3.5/site-packages/hyperkitty/lib/utils.py", line 179, in run_with_lock
    fn(*args, **kwargs)
  File "/home/mailman/env3/lib/python3.5/site-packages/hyperkitty/search_indexes.py", line 115, in update_index
    update_cmd.update_backend("hyperkitty", "default")
  File "/home/mailman/env3/lib/python3.5/site-packages/haystack/management/commands/update_index.py", line 276, in update_backend
    last_max_pk=max_pk)
  File "/home/mailman/env3/lib/python3.5/site-packages/haystack/management/commands/update_index.py", line 97, in do_update
    backend.update(index, current_qs, commit=commit)
  File "/home/mailman/env3/lib/python3.5/site-packages/haystack/backends/whoosh_backend.py", line 178, in update
    self.setup()
  File "/home/mailman/env3/lib/python3.5/site-packages/haystack/backends/whoosh_backend.py", line 126, in setup
    self.index = self.storage.open_index(schema=self.schema)
  File "/home/mailman/env3/lib/python3.5/site-packages/whoosh/filedb/filestore.py", line 176, in open_index
    return indexclass(self, schema=schema, indexname=indexname)
  File "/home/mailman/env3/lib/python3.5/site-packages/whoosh/index.py", line 421, in __init__
    TOC.read(self.storage, self.indexname, schema=self._schema)
  File "/home/mailman/env3/lib/python3.5/site-packages/whoosh/index.py", line 632, in read
    check_size("int", _INT_SIZE)
  File "/home/mailman/env3/lib/python3.5/site-packages/whoosh/index.py", line 626, in check_size
    sz = stream.read_varint()
  File "/home/mailman/env3/lib/python3.5/site-packages/whoosh/filedb/structfile.py", line 191, in read_varint
    return read_varint(self.read)
  File "/home/mailman/env3/lib/python3.5/site-packages/whoosh/util/varints.py", line 102, in read_varint
    b = ord(readfn(1))
TypeError: ord() expected a character, but string of length 0 found

The error repeats every minute, so I suppose it comes from the minutely cronjob. This cronjob looks like this:

This is due the the change from Python 2.7 to Python 3. The existing search index is not compatible with Python 3 whoosh.

I fixed this by deleting all the files in the index directory which is defined as PATH in HAYSTACK_CONNECTIONS in your settings and running 'django_admin update_index', but just running 'django_admin rebuild_index' should do it.

-- Mark Sapiro mark@msapiro.net The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan

for me, it's been enough to just delete the files, the minutely job has rebuilt them. Root cause seems to have been a server reboot that didn't wait for the mailman processes to finish correctly.