[Mailman-Developers] Merging users

[Barry Warsaw]

On Jul 21, 2015, at 06:39 PM, Aurelien Bompard wrote:

>If I try to associate an existing address to an existing user (without
>this address obviously), the Mailman API will reply with a 400 error
>"User already exists". Postorius currently does not detect that and
>just errors out with a 500 page (but that's not the issue here).
>
>I think I need to merge the two users, and that's currently not
>supported. I believe it would be a useful feature, so I'd like to
>discuss it here. IMHO, the only tricky part would be to merge the
>preferences associated with each user, but if I know which of my two
>users has priority, I can just resolve the conflicts that way.
>Am I missing something? Do you agree it would be a useful feature to have?

So, Abhilash submitted a merge request to allow for unlinked addresses to be
linked to existing users via the REST API.

https://gitlab.com/mailman/mailman/merge_requests/30

That's essentially the correct fix for the first order problem (though there's
a subtle bug in the mr that I will fix manually).

If that answers your question, then great!

Actually merging two existing users is indeed a tricky thing because users
link to so many other interesting bits and pieces.  Two separate users have
two separate memberships, linked addresses, preferred addresses, and yes,
preferences.  There are also the created_on, display_name, and (the mostly
unused) password attributes.

How deep does merging users go?

Cheers,
-Barry