[Mailman-Developers] Architecture for extra profile info

[Richard Wackerbarth]

On Apr 28, 2013, at 11:59 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen at xemacs.org> wrote:

> Richard Wackerbarth writes:
<snip>
> My point is that IMHO it's flexible *enough*.
> 
>> I'm advocating that we attach the roles (whatever they may be) to
>> an entire collection of lists.
> 
> I know what you're advocating, and I agree with the general theory of
> constructing for flexibility.  I just don't see a need for it.

One point that I had overlooked is that you have already acknowledged an additional "layer" between "domain" and "list".
So you have at least three layers. Do you really think that it is more difficult to implement a general recursive tree than it is to implement those layers?

Another case for generality is permissions. I don't propose to know all of the parameters that will be associated with a list. In fact, I am sure that they will change over time.  There has already been expressed a desire to have plug-in extensions (which might add some additional parameters of their own). However, from the view of the admin UI, all parameters share the common characteristic that they either can, or cannot, be altered by the <role>. Using the generic abstraction that every parameter is a case of the Parameter class, and subclassing that to provide commonly seen variations (for example, "boolean") allows us implement a flexible structure that does not require handler recoding as the set of parameters changes.