[Mailman-Developers] [GSoC 2012] Metrics

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Hi George,

Thanks for the report!  A couple of quick comments:

On Thu, May 3, 2012 at 8:04 AM, George Chatzisofroniou
<sophron at latthi.com> wrote:

> I’m also thinking to rearrange the GSoC schedule a bit. I’ll start
> writing code on the bonding period,

It's up to your coding mentors, but it's generally not a good idea to
try to move up the coding stage by too much.  Make sure you have a
clear spec before you start coding anything, and at least a rough
sketch of a design.  Without those two pieces, there's no standard to
evaluate progress, or whether your code is doing the right thing.

> so i can have more time during my
> university’s exams (starting on half of June).

I'd say just take the time as needed, after negotiating with your mentors.

> Settings
>
> The Django app should handle some configuration parameters, like:
>
> - Maximum number of the subscribers of a mailing list the user wants
> to be shown in the charts

I don't know how feasible it would be to implement, but if you're
willing to use AJAX, you could simply build up bar and line charts on
the fly, adding "slices" of say 5 users at a time on the right side of
the chart in progress.  That might be cool.  It could be set in a
"viewport" and scrolled if it gets too big for the viewport.

> - A multi-state variable (None, abbreviated, full) for masking email
> addresses at the results (we don’t want the emails to be spammed)

This is pointless if the archives show addresses.  So archives and
list should coordinate with the chart module on this.  I suppose this
should be a query to the list config (and maybe per user configs).

> - Month – This model will store total posts and threads for each month
> - Year – Similar to month model, this one will store total posts and
> threads for each year

It's not clear to me why year views can't be generated as an aggregate
of monthly data?  This would allow years to start with arbitrary
months without too much redundancy.

> Interface to the MM core
>
> The app needs to interact with the Mailman core. I think the best idea
> is to implement a message bus that will send a notification every time
> a message is sent (the same way an archiver works).

Why not just use the iArchiver interface?

I think it should be possible to have this be a standalone app serving
the list itself, or be hosted by a particular archive, which wouldn't
need to be the list host (or even run by the same organization).