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

[Barry A. Warsaw]

>>>>> "JCL" == J C Lawrence <claw@kanga.nu> writes:

    >> If I understand what you're asking, yes.  IOW, I don't muck
    >> about in the plain text aliases file, but I write directly to
    >> the file that newaliases would produce.

    JCL> Then what happens when I need to manually touch that alias
    JCL> file for some reason (eg I edit the aliases to insert demime
    JCL> in the pipeline) and have postfix rebuild it?  You need to
    JCL> touch both the plain text alias file and the DBM.

Two suggestions:

- If you want to insert demime in front of the pipeline for all lists,
  then edit Mailman/MTA/Utils.py to generate whatever expansion of the
  aliases you want.  Currently these expand to

  mylist:         "|/path/to/mailman/mail/wrapper post mylist"
  mylist-admin:   "|/path/to/mailman/mail/wrapper mailowner mylist"
  mylist-request: "|/path/to/mailman/mail/wrapper mailcmd mylist"
  mylist-owner:   mylist-admin

- If you only want to insert demime in front of some lists and not
  others, then I would suggest writing a custom module for the
  Mailman/MTA directory and using that instead (i.e. setting
  MTA = 'MyCustomMTA' in mm_cfg.py).

That having been said, I'm adding a command line script
(bin/genaliases) that will re-generate both the dbhash alias file and
the plain-text alias file based on the list of mailing lists.

What I don't want to do is use the plain text file as the canonical
database file for integration with the MTA.  I fear the grepping and
cut-n-paste that would have to be done programmatically would be too
fragile.  And then you still have to get newaliases run, which poses
problems in its own right.

Ideally, none of this would be necessary because the MTA would just
have a single hook for it to auto-recognize mailing lists.  Exim does
it well, and it looks like David Champion's got a good solution for
Sendmail.  I'll follow up on the alternative Postfix solution shortly,
in a separate email.

-Barry

P.S. genaliases and Mailman/MTA/Utils.py will be checked in soon.