[Mailman-Developers] Enabling topics with only one topic: can'texclude topic?

[Mark Sapiro]

Barry Warsaw wrote:
>
>On Aug 6, 2008, at 1:04 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
>
>> The bzr developers are considering splitting their Mailman list into a
>> -dev and a -user list, but they don't like that because they feel it
>> would split their community in an undesirable way.  So the proposal is
>> to create a [codereview] topic which gets workflow-related posts
>> (nitty-gritty coding style comments as well as automatically generated
>> messages from a patch queue manager).  Most users aren't going to be
>> interested in these, but will be interested in bug reports and their
>> resolutions, and in design discussions, which will not get an explicit
>> topic.
>>
>> So many users would like to select *only* messages *without* explicit
>> topic.  The quoted post claims that appears to be impossible.  Seems
>> like a bug to me, either in the topic feature (if it *is* impossible)
>> or in the page template documenting usage.
>
>JAM pinged me in private irc and he's going to try to create a dummy  
>topic which users can subscribe to to essentially filter out the  
>codereview tags.  It's a bit tricky because you have to create a  
>negative regexp that's narrower than .* for the dummy topic.
>
>I think underneath the u/i it might not be difficult to support a  
>"don't subscribe to this topic" setting.  That's something for 2.2  
>though, as I think it's a new feature.


I'm thinking of handling it differently. Namely, just changing "Do you
want to receive messages that do not match any topic filter?" so that
it works even if you are not subscribed to any topic and sends you
everything that doesn't match, but not anything that does match. It
seems that that would handle the "everything but the one defined
topic" case as well as the more general "I don't want any of the
defined topics, but I want everything else" case.

Thoughts?

-- 
Mark Sapiro <mark at msapiro.net>        The highway is for gamblers,
San Francisco Bay Area, California    better use your sense - B. Dylan