[Mailman-Developers] [CLI Project] Support of filtering of objects in Command Shell

[Barry Warsaw]

On Jun 28, 2014, at 10:55 PM, Rajeev S wrote:

>By using the first approach, a good performance improvement is achieved, by
>leaving the data filtering to database engine. But this limits the usability
>of of the CLI to the system in which the mailman database exists, as the
>remote connections to DB servers are usually disabled.

Not only that, but there no backward compatibility guarantees about the
database schema.  The only guarantee is that there will be some automated
scripts to do schema migration if it does change.

>By using the second approach, the performance is bad, as it requires a normal
>python `for` loop that compares the the results one by one. However, this
>approach might be easier in case that the mailman installation be managed
>remotely, if its OK to enable the REST API to accept connections from remote
>machines.(I believe this is currently not supported/disabled by default.)

Correct, and the core's REST server should never be exposed to the internet.
That's the purpose of the REST proxy layer, probably best provided by
Postorius, which mediates access to the REST API via an authorization layer.

However, it's entirely feasible that additional REST APIs be built that can
provide more advanced access to the data model, such as filtering.  Membership
search and rosters already provide some functionality like this.

Cheers,
-Barry