Took care of the proliferating subject-line prefix

Ken Manheimer klm@python.org
Thu, 26 Feb 1998 20:03:41 -0500 (EST)


For anyone that's interested, i've packaged up my current version of
mailman as three files in 

	ftp://www.python.org/pub/python/contrib/Networking/mailman

(Note that the klm.p1 patches *supercede* any prior patch packages i
sent out - lots of developments today and yesterday.  I will try to
stick with incremental patches for incremental releases from this
point forward.)

mailman-1.0b1.tar.gz - The most recent surviving version (since his
server crash and data loss) of john viegas mailman distribution that i
could find, and

klm.p1 - patches i've assembled over three or four days of hacking, to
bring the revision to 1.0b1.1 (from 1.0b1).  They implement a bunch of 
features, some of which i found imperative.  There's a synopsis of the 
new features in...

klm.notes1 - notes about the first set of patches.  Here's the major
highlights:

 - optional anti-spam filter, imposing the constraint that postings
   with the 'require_explicit_destination' option set must have the
   name of the list among the explicit recipients ('to' or 'cc') addrs 
   in the message.  This measure has been working *quite* nicely on the
   majordomo lists that i hacked it onto.

 - rmlist now does *not* get nasty and delete all the lists,
   templates, and archive hierarchies if you invoke it without any
   arguments.  !

 - All the list configuration defaults are collected in
   modules/mm_cfg.py, so ideally the installer compiles the wrappers,
   puts the files in place, and then applies their settings to this
   file to configure all the defaults for all the lists.

 - monthly password reminders are sent out collecting together each
   users passwords in a single message, rather than sending a message
   per password.

 - Prevent cascading subject-line list prefix (which effect many of
   you on the meta-sig may have noticed in the initial postings -
   i hadn't tried using the subject-line prefix in my test lists!-)

There's more - read klm.notes1 for details.  And these fixes are
really not so big compared to the very nice features mailman offers in
the first place.  I won't go into that here, just suggest you try it
out if you're looking for a good maillist mechanism...

Note that i'll be away most of tomorrow and this weekend (in the grand
python tradition of being unreachable just after a release).  Barring
any catastrophic behaviors of the setup in my absence, i'll probably
be announcing this on the python newsgroup early next week, and
switching over the rest of the python.org mailing lists at that point.
(I will probably work with andrew kuchling to integrate with the newer
pipermail, first.)

Ken Manheimer		  klm@python.org	    703 620-8990 x268
	    (orporation for National Research |nitiatives

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