[Mailman-Developers] Architecture for extra profile info

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Richard Wackerbarth writes:

 > 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?

No.  What I think is difficult is to implement a general recursive tree
*and* an API for expressing properties of nodes that make them
equivalent to the specialized hierarchy *and* a usable interface for
specifying and managing those properties by non-programmer users
(including admins).

 > Another case for generality is permissions. I don't propose to know
 > all of the parameters that will be associated with a list.

You're pushing on a string here.  I'm not opposed to generality in
general. ;-)  What's more important to me than whether you know all of
the parameters that will be associated with a list :-) is that I'm
pretty sure I don't want Postorius's views to know.  That leads to
ugly and unmaintainable code.

I also don't want users to be seeing data they don't need to see, or
shouldn't see, and they mustn't be able to change parameters they
shouldn't change.  These requirements can be fulfilled in a number of
ways, including customization by extension modules.  For example,
there could be (extensible) lists of parameters attached to each role,
a list for each permission.

I think that's kind of fragile; better to attach an ACL to each
permission.  (I think that's basically what you have in mind, too.)