[Mailman-Developers] GSoC 2013 - GNU Mailman - Introduction and Project Discussion

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Terri Oda writes:

 > Writing individual pipelines may be trivial, but making a user interface 
 > for managing said pipelines is non-trivial.  Right now, our pipeline 
 > management interface is "there's a text box in postorius that lets you 
 > choose a pipeline.  It's not even a dropdown, and you may be screwed if 
 > you make a typo" which is obviously not how I want it when we
 > release. ;)

That's a more general issue (oh, I see you noticed that! :-), and I
have no problem with doing something about it -- indeed, I'd be more
than happy to (co-)mentor it because I just *love* custom Handlers.
Here's what I would do:

1. Get the list of handlers active to the list.
2. Append the list of inactive handlers from Mailman/Handlers (the
   site's list, not the distributed handlers).
3. The UI is table with rows containing a checkbox for "active
   handler" (the row should be greyed out if it's inactive), an
   ordinal (numerical), and the handler name (gold star for popping up
   a tooltip with a detailed description/docstring on mouseover).
4. Users can either change the numbers (error checked for uniqueness),
   with a partial order on standard handlers -- if the partial order
   is violated (including a missing handler like "ToOutgoing") the
   user is warned; or (platinum star) drag the handlers into the order
   they like (with same checks on the partial order).

 > I see a potential project timeline going something like this:
 > 
 > A. make a set of custom Mailman 3 Handlers for some well-known existing 
 > anti-spam/anti-malware software.  (Maybe 2-3 weeks of work here, finding 
 > 2-4 reasonable pieces of software, setting them up, writing the 
 > handlers, and testing them)

One week for that work, it's all in the FAQ already I suspect.

 > B. make an interface in Postorius so list admins can 
 > enable/disable/reorder these and any whitelisting happening within 
 > mailman.  This should involve making an interface in Postorius that 
 > gives admins the ability to change the Pipeline being used, and will 
 > likely involve a small amount of user testing to make sure said 
 > interface doesn't have risk of disastrous results if the administrator 
 > does the wrong thing.  (Another 3-4 weeks of work including user 
 > testing, unit tests, and documentation)

You think the design above will take more than two days (one to learn
how to do D&D to reorder a list) to code, and 4 to document and test?
(I'm assuming Mailman2 kinds of pipeline APIs are already available.
If new REST API is needed, OK, 3 weeks total.)

 > C. Figure out how to set up some sort of packager that can install 
 > handlers + antispam software so that the site admin has an easy way to 
 > set these up if requested. (Another 3-4 weeks of work, including testing 
 > any scripts on a few different OSes and extensive documentation)

OK, yes, getting PyPI down for the Handlers themselves (while these
*could* be delivered with Mailman, I think it would be more valuable
to have a standard PyPI delivery protocol for 3rd party Handlers) will
likely take that much time, and indeed one needs to deal with OS PMS.

 > Do feel free to disagree with me, of course, Stephen.

I am indeed a curmudgeon about the antispam stuff.  I don't think the
first release of Mailman 3 should contain an attractive nuisance like
serious antispam in Mailman (vs antispam in the MTA).  I'll try to
keep such negative thinking to one paragraph per post, though. :-)

 > Or complain that I'm using the lure of antispam to get someone
 > solve my user interface for pipelines problem, which I totally
 > am. ;)

While I do think that an initial implementation is probably a total of
about 2 weeks worth of work, I suspect that one could riff on the
theme (hi, Barry, like that metaphor?) for a couple more weeks, and
robust disaster recovery (saving off the old pipeline and restoring
looks simple enough, but Mr. Murphy is lurking, I'm sure -- in
particular, if we're going to allow through-the-web pipelines, we need
to guarantee that received mail will not get lost if the pipeline is
horked) could account for a couple more weeks.