[Mailman-Developers] Add the equivalent of postconf

[Barry Warsaw]

On Feb 17, 2012, at 11:09 PM, Aamir Khan wrote:

>Referring to this bug, https://bugs.launchpad.net/mailman/+bug/518517
>
>I am planning to implement the command 'mailconf' analogous to 'postconf'.
>As mentioned in bug description, the idea is to dump all or one variable of
>the mailman configuration variables.
>
>How can i find the configuration variables of mailman to be dumped using
>this command ?

My thought is that this command would dump configuration sections and values
from the mailman.config.config object.  These are built via the lazr.config
library and are driven by src/mailman/config/schema.cfg and
src/mailman/config/mailman.cfg in the source tree, and overridden by any
values the admin has added via /etc/mailman.cfg (and others, see START.rst for
details).

Specifically, this would *not* dump values from the database.

To start with, `bin/mailman mailconf` seems like a reasonable choice.

A thought on syntax.  Parameters would have a syntax like

    section:key

e.g.

    paths:var_dir

Maybe both the section and variable name would be optional.  In the former
case, mailconf could print all the key/values in the section.  In the latter,
it could print all keys that match the variable name.  In both cases, it
should probably print the full path to the variable.

(The colon separate might not be the best choice, since you'll probably use
that to separate keys from values.  OTOH, dot may not be the best choice
either, since it's possible that some sections may have dot names in them.
You could use the syntax

    [section]key: value

too.)

Cheers,
-Barry