[Mailman-Developers] Configurability (was Re: [ANNOUNCE] Mailman 1.0b9)

[John Viega]

Well, my philosophy on the matter is to keep the common tasks easy and
the expert tasks possible.  So I think there should be a basic
section, and an advanced section, where there'd be some overlap.  For
example, in the basic section, you could just say, "give me a
moderated list", but the fine grained control is available at the
expert level.  I don't really mind catering to everyone as long as we
focus on catering to the novice, since that's most people who will be
administrating or using a list...

John

On Wed, Mar 03, 1999 at 11:34:20AM -0800, Greg Stein wrote:
> Harald Meland wrote:
> > ...
> > For users it is always good to make _all_ the bells and whistles
> > configurable.  However, Mailman has to find a balance between user
> > configurability and how efficient list delivery should be.
> 
> I strongly disagree with the blanket statement that it is "always good".
> 
> > This means we have to make sure that making something user
> > configurable won't make list delivery unbearably inefficient for any
> >...
> > The added complexity of Mailman code this would need is also an issue.
> 
> Inefficiencies in list delivery are only a *small* piece of the problem.
> 
> If you make something too configurable, then it becomes unapproachable.
> It is simply not useful any more because there are too many knobs to
> turn.
> 
> One of John's big reasons for starting Mailman was to make a clean and
> simple mailing list manager. Part of this was simply a reaction against
> the complex Perl code in Majordomo, but John also wanted something easy
> for mere mortals to run.
> 
> You really should not keep dropping knobs onto Mailman. Look at the
> problem with the settings for "who can post to this list". LOTS of
> people have problems with getting that set up right. The problem? Too
> many knobs. "What do I set to do X?" is what happens.
> 
> IMO, your real task is to *reduce* the knobs, not add more. You should
> figure out how to automatically figure some out, or how to combine them,
> or simply drop them for lack of utility.
> 
> Cheers,
> -g
> 
> --
> Greg Stein, http://www.lyra.org/
> 
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