[Mailman-Developers] [Mailman-Users] Efficient handling of cross-posting

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Moving to Mailman-Developers:

 > > It should go without saying that it's very interesting; this is a FAQ [...]

 > Woo-hoo. That's encouraging. Well, if the only thing, that prevented the 
 > feature from appearing by now, is lack of development resources, then I'll 
 > get right on it. Thanks,

Well, it's not a lack of development resources alone.  It's one of
those "in principle" things, although not a religious principle (eg,
you won't get the "this is evil" response from anybody the way you
would with advocating Reply-To munging).

The problem, in brief, is that the design of Mailman 1 and Mailman 2
is distribution-centric.  They manage rosters of subscribers on behalf
of a list.  What you say you want is a program that manages groups of
lists on behalf of a user.  But this isn't quite good enough.  What
you really want is ... Usenet news, except on a push basis.

Doing this efficiently and maintainably is going to require a global
roster of users, which is something that Mailman 3 will provide.
There are some simple, not-too-unclean hacks that can be done, but I
think Mark Sapiro's "sister lists" feature is about the best that can
be done.