[Mailman-Developers] A feature I'd like to emphasize for GSoC ...

Tue Apr 16 11:02:57 CEST 2013

Paul Wise writes:
 > On Tue, Apr 16, 2013 at 4:08 AM, Florian Fuchs wrote:
 > 
 > > This could be something for a HTML(5)/JS/CSS savvy person (to make it
 > > *really* convenient). I'm thinking scrollable log views, that
 > > interactively append/prepend entries to the view, depending on your
 > > position in the log file. Or commenting on log snippets and saving
 > > them for further review.
 > 
 > As long these are based on progressive enhancement, sounds good.

I think "no thanks to interactive convenience", unless the candidate
is *really* good at Zen Garden stuff (ie, won't need to spend any time
thinking about progressive enhancement, let alone learning any CSS or
JS).  Convenience can only be realized if logs can be read and
effective queries are easy for users to generate, and the replies are
easy to understand, too.  Let's leave Web2.0 stuff for next summer,
please.

Remember, one of the top reasons for doing this is so that the
admin can forward the log(s) to mailman-users for analysis.  Besides
interactive access, I'd also like to be able to script (curl, wget)
the queries, so as far as I'm concerned the only web design needed for
the reply is

    text = slurp_log(log, filter)
    html = """\
<html>
<head>
  <title>Log: {0}</title>
</head>
<body>
  <h1>Log: {0}</h1>
  <pre>
{1}
  </pre>
</body>
</html>
""".format(str(filter), test)

<wink/>

The *hard* and *interesting* part to me is the query API (ie, what the
REST looks like, and that it be flexible enough to support enhanced
queries in the future) and UI (what you'll use from Postorius).

Even getting access to the files is going to be non-trivial if we go
after MTA logs too.  We're going to need to convince admins that
Mailman should be allowed to read those logs, so we're going to need
to think about preventing users from writing queries that allow them
to find out who's getting mail from pr0N sites and Kim Jong Un.  I'd
also like the code to do the MTA message ID threading to get the whole
MTA history of a message.

Steve