[Mailman-Developers] Mailman Database support

[Ricardo Kustner]

Hi,

On Thu, 27 Jul 2000 16:28:20 -0400, Andy Lowe said:

>      Another aspect which needs to be addressed is fixed DB support vs.
>  dynamic DB support.  For example, I have a table in an Oracle database
>  which I have to use.  So in effect I need to be able to give mailman
>  insert, remove and select statements so that it will know how to query
>  my database and tables.  I don't need to create tables or any such
>  stuff.  This is what I call dynamic support.  Most people I think will
>  need fixed support.  They will want mailman to generate /access it's own
>  tables etc. . . They could care less about how the tables are set up.

First of all, much of my 'knowledge' about databases/programming comes
from personal experience over the years and less from an education so
please forgive me if i say something stupid ;)
I was thinking about modularizing it in such a way that you have
complete freedom in implementing your own DB code... anybody should be able
to write a 'contributed' module that handles the database without having
to know much about the rest of the code... I doesn't even have to be
a 'real' database; it should be transparent to the rest of the code...
The standard module could be using marshall-db, the way mailman stores
the configuration right now (so people who don't care about connecting
to a 'real' database don't have to worry about it). What about first isolating 
*all* code which uses marshall into a seperate module so it theoretically can 
easily be replaced different code for storing/accessing data? 
One potential problem I see is when adding new options to mailman so the
configuration database tables need to be updated with new releases... but
maybe it could be stored in a some flexible way... since the config options are
key/value
pairs anyway....

>  requirements / API's assuming we take the difficult path.  Any input
>  would be greatly appreciated.  Would anyone be interested in writing
>  back ends for other things then Oracle?  I can see RDBs, LDAP, and maybe
>  RADIUS, but I do not understand ZOPE well enough to visualize the
>  connection.

well I could help out with MySQL (which I use a lot for my web development) and
MS-SQL (if i can find a way to have python work with sybase libs)... If we got
something
with MS-SQL i know i will make a lot of people at my work *really* happy ;)

Ricardo.

-- 
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