[Mailman-Developers] Storing additional user data

[Barry Warsaw]

On Thu, 2003-07-10 at 15:37, Chuq Von Rospach wrote:

> Zope should be one of the interfaces, definitely, but I really think 
> it's time Mailman is interfaced with some non-Python tools so it can 
> play better with the world beyond Python. It'll help it become that 
> much more accepted Out There...

Sure.  MM3 will be much more toolkit oriented, with replaceable web
components, user database, user interface, etc.  The core code will
always be Python, but I intend to write interfaces to all the pluggable
stuff.

The question is what the medium for pluggability is going to be.  Python
has good IPC support, including XMLRPC and ORB-ish interfaces.  It's
always going to be easiest to extend and embed in Python, but it should
be possible to interface it with non-native applications.  But how, and
how much of that should come with the Mailman core?

For example, I know a lot of people want to interface Mailman with PHP. 
I don't really know what that means though.  Do you want to be able to
write the entire web interface in PHP?  If we defined a classic CGI
interface to Mailman, would that be enough?  E.g. "The privacy screen
takes the following form variables: blah, foo, baz which must be a
string, int, and a float respectively."  That ought to be doable to some
reasonable approximation.

Interfacing a Python library with an external system has all the issues
that any such system will have.  How do you interface a C++ web
application with a Perl U/I?  I think we need to map out what components
people want to replace, and then define mechanisms and interfaces for
other things to be slotted in.

I don't want to lose sight of the requirement for Mailman to be usable
out of the box though.

-Barry