[Mailman-Developers] Creation/deletion of lists through-the-web

[Ron Jarrell]

At 12:27 PM 5/9/01 -0400, Barry A. Warsaw wrote:

>>>>>> "JRA" == Jay R Ashworth <jra@baylink.com> writes:
>
>    JRA> Ain't Python great?
>
>(ssshhh!  they'll discover our secret weapon. :)
>
>    JRA> IMHO, the proper solution for sendmail is for the admin to
>    JRA> put an :include: in /etc/aliases pointing to
>    JRA> /home/mailman/data/aliases, and rebuild that from scratch
>    JRA> against the current list of lists every time that list
>    JRA> changes.
>
>I'm really trying to avoid having to write the sendmail code myself.
>I just have too many scary flashbacks when I even think about mucking
>with sendmail. ;}


That's in the cf file.  You can specify more than one alias file.  Which is probably
the cleanest way to do it; you'll still need something, if only a cronjob that runs
newaliases - I shudder at the the thought of manipulating the sendmail alias db
file directly, particularly since my python 2.0 will flatly not compile with the version
of DB that sendmail is using; I suspect it's too new for the DB routines shipped with
python.

Note that eric said a while ago that he's deprecating the "auto rebuild alias file" for
security reasons, so at some point that functionality will likely go away.


>    JRA> I suspect you'll need one more: how to get the aliases
>    JRA> database rebuilt when it's been changed.
>
>That's the beauty of the Postfix approach: I'm modifying the database
>directly so it doesn't need to be rebuilt (i.e. no need to run
>newaliases).  I don't even have to notify Postfix since it'll notice
>the change after one minute.

Until the first time something goes wrong... Then you'll  need a tool
to regenerate all the aliases again from scratch.  I really don't like the fact
that I won't have a text DB source file around...

>>>>>> "TW" == Thomas Wouters <thomas@xs4all.net> writes:
>
>    TW> What about a 'send list creation message' ? And a
>    TW> 'auto-generate password' button ? In my eyes, typically, the
>    TW> person creating the list won't be the list owner him/herself,
>    TW> so those things make sense to me.
>
>The list creation message is always sent currently.  Does it make
>sense to be able to inhibit that?

Yes.  I currently manually go in and fix some things that just can't be set
from defaults easily before letting the admin know.  Ideally I'd like a button
for "(re)send list creation message now", because what I do is run newlist,
hit ctl-z, go off and make my changes, fg it, and let it send the list message...