[Mailman-Developers] Regarding Csv Export for list owner in postorius

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Sumana Harihareswara writes:

 > Stephen, I suspect you are overestimating the technical skill of
 > some members of communities that want to use Mailman.

I doubt it.

My point is that we're talking about the PDF proposal, not the CSV
feature.  I may be underestimating the ability of programs other than
printer drivers to do useful things with PDF, but in my experience
printing is about all you can do unless you have a full suite of Adobe
tools.  Note that if you download CSV on most modern desktops, you
will automatically be dropped into a spreadsheet program.  So I would
suppose that the workflow is

1.  Click on "output member list" button in Mailman
2.  Button down on File in Excel
3.  Drag to print, release
4.  Click on "output PDF" button
5.  Type in file name (these programs, or the mail authors, usually
    have horribly bad suggestions for the file names).
6.  Click Save button.

 > > How is it helpful?

 > Here's a use case I ran into in December: I was editing a private
 > document in Google Drive and wanted to share it with about 40
 > people, all of whom were on the same email thread as me. I ended up
 > spending many tedious minutes copying and pasting email addresses
 > into the "Share" dialog box in Google Drive. If I were a list owner
 > for a community that used Google Drive, I bet this sort of need
 > would crop up several times per year, and I'd wish there were an
 > easy way for me to import that membership roster into a Google
 > Drive permissions list.

I do not for one second doubt the utility of file output of membership
rosters in a convenient, Microsoft-compatible format.  But with CSV,
we already have that.  It's the utility of *PDF* that I'm questioning.

 > I have, as an event organizer, seen situations where venue
 > managers, school administrators, and similar bureaucrats demanded
 > PDFs.

Me, too, in fact I do it myself in preference to working with .doc.
But are list managers really likely to be so untechnical as to be
unable to produce PDF from CSV?  Also, are these PDFs going to be
*just* "Display Name <mailbox at domain.tld>", or are they going to
contain other information?  Generating CSV makes it easy to delete
columns and rows as appropriate, or add them by hand.  PDF, OTOH, is
basically an uneditable blob.