[Mailman-Developers] Re: being flexible.

[Simone Piunno]

Alle 01:51, venerdì 31 ottobre 2003, J C Lawrence ha scritto:

> > A test installation (or a poor man's installation) will fetch messages
> > from pop3 mailboxes...
>
> Hell no.  Mailman is a conformant well behaved and very standard mail
> system, not a hack on top of a kludge that deliberately flouts the
> standards just because it wants to.

Hehe, I knew you'd have screamed :)
Try to think it the other way: a test installation with pop3 is an hack on top 
of a solid conformant well behaved and very standard mail system.  Skilled 
people can do it right now with Mailman 2.1: just configure fetchmail to act 
as an MTA and pipe messages to Mailman.  
The only difference I proposed is that non-skilled people should be able to do 
this... BTW we already use lynx for html->text conversion, and we already 
prepare aliases and virtual for postfix, so we could also make Mailman able 
to generate a fetchmail.conf file. 
I'm not asking to make really heavy hacks like using a single email address to 
carry all the incoming traffic (-bounce, -join, -leave and so on).  Nowadays 
many people have mailboxes gathering all the traffic for many addresses, and 
it's very common for people to have web access to the configuration of all 
the mailboxes for a domain they own but, is managed on a 3rd party mail 
server they can't install Mailman.

> > serve web pages directly, controlling port 80 (no real web server
> > involved).
>
> Why?  Even ignoring the abuse possibilities, what possible reason could
> we have for that time and effort investment when those problems are
> already far more competently and easily handled than we ever could, and
> there are so many other, more rewarding and demanding problems and
> features on the burner?

We all know CGI is sub-optimal.  We're also planning to stop vending archives 
directly from disk, increasing the CGI load.  mod_python or a web runner 
would perform better.  
I feel the reverse-proxy configuration (similar to zope) would be the better 
choice.  And yes, I know that there are web servers unable to proxy requests 
on a backend server, but this is easily solved by a small CGI just proxying 
requests (we already do something very similar for incoming email, even if we 
do it for different reasons - e.g. to use SGID for security)
So *if* we accept this solution, we already have an HTTP interface and we get 
direct HTTP (for tests) for free.  Whenever you have a problem in the proxied 
configuration, you absolutely want to make direct requests to the backend, at 
least to determine where the problem is (in the web server or in Mailman 
itself?).

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