[Mailman-Developers] Mailman 3 configuration questions and feedback

[Barry Warsaw]

On May 22, 2012, at 10:49 AM, Jeff Marshall wrote:

>Hey everybody.  I've been playing with 3.0.0b1 and Postorius.  I have
>some questions as well as some initial feedback.  I am assuming many
>of these are known issues or works-in-progress so I apologize ahead of
>time.

Glad you're taking a look Jeff.  I'll answer questions about the core and
leave Postorius to the web guys. :)

>* How do I add another person as an administrator to either a single
>list or to my full mailman installation?  I don't see this in either
>Postorius or the command line tools.

This is not exposed in the cli right now.  It's certainly not hard to do from
the internal API, and in fact would be fairly easily to write as a 'withlist'
script.

The closes thing right now is the 'members' subcommand, which takes an --add
switch.  This is still pretty dumb though because it's only capable of adding
regular members to a single list.

What kind of cli would you want to see?  I'm not sure whether this
functionality should go in the 'members' subcommand, or a separate
subcommand.  I'm also not frankly certain that 'members --add' is a very good
cli.  (Possibly, 'members' should morph into a read-only command, with a
separate command for updating.)

>* How do I enabling public archiving?  I see the archive mentions in
>the config files but I'm not finding it clear how to flip it on.

Right now, it's a little convoluted.  (I'm still trying to get the schema
migration branch working, which could change some of this.)  The mailman.cfg
file is used only to globally enable, disable, or define archivers available
to Mailman.  Each mailing list itself then has two variables which essentially
expose three states:

 * mlist.archive (bool) - whether the mailing list archives messages at all

  * mlist.archive_private (bool) - whether archives for the list are public or
    private. 

Once the schema migration branch lands, this will be one variable
mlist.archive_policy with an enum value, something like ArchivePolicy.never,
ArchivePolicy.private, ArchivePolicy.public.

Now, what actually happens with these values is currently left up to the
individual archivers, with the mail-archive archiver being the only one that
looks at mlist.archive_private.  If this value is true, it will simply ignore
any messages handed to it.  None of the other archivers currently do anything
with this value.

mlist.archive *is* used globally in a few places.  It informs whether the
List-Archive and Archived-At headers get added, but more importantly, if this
value is false, the message will not even get enqueued to the archive runner.

>* Is there a plan for exposing some list traffic stats on the Mailman
>API and on Postorius?  It would be handy to see # of messages received
>today, etc, especially at this stage when I'm trying to figure out
>what is working or not.

There is a summer of code project addressing this.

>I'm happy to file tickets on Launchpad but I didn't want to do so
>until I understood what is already in progress.

That's the state of affairs as regards to the core.  Do feel free to file bugs
on the cli for adding owners and moderators.  Keep in mind that some bits of
the archiver infrastructure will change with the schema migration.

Please tag bugs with 'mailman3' so they show up on my radar. :)

Cheers,
-Barry