[Mailman-Developers] Mailman 3: dlist integration

[Terri Oda]

On 12-11-11 6:31 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
> How is the new name determined?
With Systers' current setup, I believe it takes the largest word in the 
title (skipping obvious stop words) and adds a 3 digit number if 
necessary.  There might be some truncation if the word is super long 
and  some de-duplication code -- I don't recall the full algorithm.
> What happens if you just post to mailinglist at example.com?
Right now, it sends you a message saying that you need to either post to 
+new to start a new thread or reply to an existing thread, with some 
appropriate help text.

> Is it possible to split or merge threads?
Posters can split off a thread at any time by just replying to +new 
instead of the existing thread. There is currently no way to merge threads.

> What happens occasionally on Python lists is that a discussion that
> originates on one list will propagate to another, then disappear from
> the first, then come back to the first.  (distutils-sig is especially
> famous for this behavior, with the "other list" being python-dev.)
>
> What behavior would you propose for the dlists in this case?
>
What it currently does is nothing in particular -- if you add the 
posting address with the old dlist name in, it would post back to that 
dlist.  If you put in a +new, it would make a new one.  If you did no 
specifying of the dynamic sublist/thread manually, it'll tell you to 
choose one.  I can't think of a better way to handle this off the top of 
my head for much the same reasons that correctly threading archives is 
hard.

If we're seriously going to have this replace topics, we might want to 
make it so something like the existing topic indicators could be tied to 
a thread somehow too ("topic: dlistthread" headers as an option instead 
of +dlistthread?) but for a first pass, I just want to do as much of a 
straight port of the existing code as I can. It's been well user-tested 
in that state (the systers list being the largest example, with over 3k 
users and has been running for over a decade) so that's a solid, tested 
starting point for the Mailman 3.0 implementation.

Incidentally, dynamic sublists are a list-wide setting that the admin 
would have to enable, the way they're currently written, and that's one 
of those things I personally would keep the same.   Much like topics, 
dlists do require some training on the part of your users (and from 
experience, I'd say the amount of training and chasing down the "but you 
need to post this right next time!" is somewhat similar for dlists and 
topics) so I wouldn't want to drop people into that unless this is a 
feature they really want.

  Terri