[Mailman-Developers] Pickle-induced integration issues

[Brad Knowles]

At 4:24 PM -0700 2004-09-30, Rob Lanphier wrote:

>  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.

	See <http://www.list.org/devs.html>.  In particular:

		Mailman uses an inefficient persistency system based on
		Python pickles, and every mailing list has its own pickled
		state. This has several disadvantages, including poor
		scalability, difficulty in doing cross-mailing list
		operations, and the virtual host limitation on list names.
		Mailman 3.0 will use a real database, perhaps based on ZODB
		or BerkeleyDB. Again, the goal is to generalize the
		interface to the backend database so that others can be
		used, but choose one and ship it by default.

>  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.

	You could funnel your work into Mailman3, and if you could get 
some budget to make that happen, then the project will be able to be 
shipped that much faster.

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad at stop.mail-abuse.org>

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

     -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
     Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755

   SAGE member since 1995.  See <http://www.sage.org/> for more info.