[Mailman-Developers] Pickle-induced integration issues

[Rob Lanphier]

Hi folks,

I manage Helix Community, which makes pretty heavy use of Mailman as
integrated into GForge.  I'm moderately familiar with Mailman code, and
pretty familiar with GForge.  Of course, Perl is my native tongue, so
I'm equally uncomfortable in both codebases  ;-)

Anyway, one thing that my users are constantly clamoring for is features
that would come from tighter integration between GForge and Mailman.
I've been mulling this over for a while, and it seems that deep
integration is limited by the way that most Mailman data is stored in
pickles.  Since GForge is coded and pretty heavily bound to PHP.

My options for integration between the two seem to be:
1.  Implement alternate GForge authentication mechanism in Mailman 
2.  Implement alternate, PHP-compatible storage mechanism (e.g. SQL
database) for everything currently stored in pickles
3.  Implement pickle support in PHP
4.  Implement IPC mechanism (e.g. SOAP, XML-RPC) as a Mailman control
daemon, and call that from GForge

I'm wondering if there are recommendations from this group.  I'm also
wondering if there have been any movements/efforts in any of these
directions already.

This is one of many problems that I plan to work on over time, and plan
to contribute patches to the extent that they are useful to a larger
community.  If I'm lucky, I'll get budget to hire developers for this,
but for now, I'll be doing this on the cheap.

Thoughts?
Rob
-- 
Rob Lanphier, Development Support Manager - RealNetworks
Helix Community: http://helixcommunity.org 
Development Support:
http://www.realnetworks.com/products/support/devsupport