[Mailman-Developers] Interfacing to Mailman data

[Kevin McCann]

Hi Barry,

Hope you had a good vacation.

A while ago I mentioned that I was interfacing with Mailman (via PHP) by
issuing the /bin commands and parsing the results. As you pointed out,
that may not be very efficient, but my rationale is that your scripts
are doing the "behind the scenes" things which I want to rely on. A
non-parsing but still relevant example: I think you do database locking
when, say, creating a new list. For me, the extra process in firing up
the /bin command is negligible. It would be nice to not have to parse
unwieldy output, though.

What about having interface-friendly versions of these commands? So,
instead of executing the /bin/list_lists command and getting ...

6 matching mailing lists found:
    Administrivia - Discussions pertaining to cruciverb web site
      cruciverb-l - Crossword Constructors Discussion List
             cwml - Crossword Markup Language List
          Mailman - [no description available]
       BQ-Newsletter - The Broken Cue Newsletter
          Testing - [no description available]

... I could instead execute a different command and get a
comma-delimited list:

Administrivia,cruciverb-l,cwml,Mailman,BQ-Newsletter,Testing

or, get more info if required, such as name, security, description, one
record per line:

Administrivia,0,Discussions pertaining to cruciverb web site
cruciverb-l,0,Crossword Constructors Discussion List
cwml,1,Crossword Markup Language List
Mailman,0,[no description available]
Newsletter,0,The Broken Cue Newsletter
Testing,1,[no description available]

And it would be most sublime to be able to issue the list_config command
and have it work with stdin/stdout instead of files and using the same
kind of delimited layout as shown above.

I know you're a busy guy. So how can I help? I'm not a Python programmer
yet but I'm willing to become one to get these kinds of things to
happen. Could you help me get started by indicating what files I would
need to copy and then modify to, say, create an interface-friendly
version of list_lists? 

Best,
Kevin McCann