[Mailman-Developers] Mailman limitations

[Thomas Wouters]

On Mon, Feb 14, 2000 at 05:57:54PM +0100, Harald Meland wrote:
> [Thomas Wouters]

 [me complaining about configuration pages]

> Some time back, someone asked whether it would be possible to have
> different "styles" on the list admin pages -- i.e., the more techish
> admins would get the full (overwhelming) set of admin settings, while
> newbie admins would get a (much less confusing and) smaller set of the
> most commonly used list settings (possibly with the option of getting
> access to the full set of settings if they e.g. followed some "for
> expert list admins" link).

Well, what would be pretty welcome, i think, is a clear division between
'You probably want to edit or at least browse these options', and 'you dont
really need to change anything here, unless Mailman isn't working properly.'
That's more or less what my incoherent blurp about adminpages was about. The
expert-options dont actually need to be inaccessible... they just need to be
flagged as 'dont bother with these', or some such.

> Should Mailman be integrated with Zope?

Eww, well, saying it like that, 'be integrated', my first reaction is 'no'.
(Well, that's my first printable reaction ;) I dont run Zope, and i dont
plan to run Zope anytime soon, mostly because it does something i, being a
techy, have absolutely no need for. Maybe our webteam wants it, but i
doubt it -- they're focusing on other things right now.

I wouldn't object in any way against a sort-of 'driver' for Zope, a
Zope-interface to Mailman, as long as you aren't supposed to use it, but i
dobut it'll fly if it doesn' thave at least one, preferably more, dedicated
maintainers. And the fact it hasn't been built yet, suggests that that
dedication isn't there yet ;)

> > (While I was writing this and thinking it up (in that order ;) I thought how
> > incredibly cool it would be to have some kind of rule-based message
> > acception (/refusal/holding/discarding/temp-fail/...) system, where each
> > rule could be header-match, number of postings to the list so far, load of
> > the machine matched against a priority for the list or user, time of day or
> > whatever. And where each rule would have it's own default reject/accept
> > messages, of course. Not very hard to implement in Python and the current
> > 'pipe' architecture, if I may be so kind. But for the life of me I can't
> > figure out how to make such a scheme configurable through an HTML page ;P)
> 
> That's *exactly* the way I feel about that stuff. :)

> Of course, you could just let the admin edit the rules as pure text --
> and then have the CGI script do the appropriate syntax checks and
> other sanity checks/rule validation before actually changing the
> list's configuration.

> Of course, that would mean we're _very_ close to significantly
> affecting the slope of Mailman's learning curve.

No, because you can offer the current system as well. Maybe a few 'default'
reject/hold rules that you can turn on and off. But you can't do it really
flexible using HTML, so if you want the *real* power, you have to edit the
textbox. And the textbox needs to have flashing red warning messages around
it, of course. But it needn't be more difficult than Python.

That's more or less what i had in mind... a 'Simple as hell, who needs a
manual' section, and a 'easy as python, read the simple docs first' section
;)

> > It's just that I dont see the lively discussions I'm used to

> I can relate with that -- but I can't really figure out why that's how
> things are here at mailman-developers...

Because the developers are overworked, and the public too impatient ? :)

Short-message-cuz-Fawlty-Towers-is-on-ly y'rs,
-- 
Thomas Wouters <thomas@xs4all.net>

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