[Mailman-Developers] PHP Wrappers?

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

>>>>> "Brad" == Brad Knowles <brad at stop.mail-abuse.org> writes:

    Brad> 	Show me a single open data format that all MTAs
    Brad> understand. Hell, there aren't many file formats that they
    Brad> all understand.

C'mon, Brad, don't let the perfect be the enemy of all improvement.

For access to the ACL database, we really need only to consider two
MTAs (at most): Exim and Postfix.  Sendmail has milters for this
purpose; you don't need to do surgery on sendmail itself, just
configure the mailman-acl milter.  qmail users are fanatics, let them
deal with it, because you know they will.  Which others matter to
Mailman?  So make it Exim and Postfix compatible, and we can do the
others later, or leave it to their users/developers.

The point is that if Mailman does a reasonable job of specifying
access to a database of list ACLs, people can and will write adapters
for their drug of choice.  Other MLMs will follow the Mailman spec if
it's decent and we get there first.  The whole Internet wins.

    >> The ACLs themselves should be represented in some open format,
    >> like regular expressions.

    Brad> 	Again, show me a single open format that all MTAs
    Brad> understand.

The ACL format is a much tougher requirement, and will require a lot
of thought.  Do we want to specify archive ACLs in the same database?
How do we condition access on the various authentication methods that
users may use?  "Like regular expressions" means exactly what?  Etc,
etc.

Again, if we specify and mostly implement such an interface well, the
users will come and they'll make their other tools work with it.

If you want to say that specifying these formats _well enough_ to
attract users and to make related products (both substitutes like
Majordomo and complements like Postfix) willing to support them is
"too hard" or "is a project for MM3 or maybe MM3.1", I'll defer to you
on that.  But saying "it's gotta be perfect on introduction or it's no
good" is not a way to communicate.

-- 
School of Systems and Information Engineering http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp
University of Tsukuba                    Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN
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