[Mailman-Developers] [GSoC 2014] Mailman CLI Project

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Barry Warsaw writes:

 > Also as a general rule, I think we want just one level of
 > subcommand, so that `mmclient show --list` would be the template.
 > (That's open to discussion.)

I wonder about this in the context of argparse and the command line,
because argparse makes a strong distinction (and corresponding
associations) between *required positional* arguments and *optional*
keyword-like arguments (ie, any argument with leading dashes).

In the model Rajeev has shown so far, the "scope" argument (list,
domain, user) hasn't been optional.

 > mmclient set --key <name> --value <value>

This seems unnecessarily verbose on the one hand, and to not actually
correspond to an actual use case, on the other: there's no scope
mentioned.  I feel the scope should be mandatory, even if it's
sitewide:

    mmclient set --site-wide --key CAN_PERSONALIZE --value No
    mmclient set --domain=python.org --key CAN_PERSONALIZE --value Yes

(after the first one, the second would be an error, I guess, but in
other cases a site-wide setting would be interpreted as a default).

I guess this horse has already bolted the barn, but I wonder about a
syntax like

    mmclient set --site-wide --key PERSONALIZE --value Permitted
    mmclient set --domain=python.org --key PERSONALIZE --value Permitted
    mmclient set --list=mailman-users at python.org --key PERSONALIZE --value No

for resource constraining settings.  (Permitted could probably be an
alias for False.)

Steve