[Mailman-Developers] Merging users

[Abhilash Raj]

Hi Aurelien,

On 21 July 2015 at 22:09, Aurelien Bompard <aurelien at bompard.org> wrote:

> Hey devs!
>
> I'm hitting a problem when migrating from 2.1 to 3, but I think it's a
> generic issue (or rather a missing feature) and I'd like to fix it.
>
> 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 tried doing this on a mailman shell, and I was able to associate an
existing address with an existing user. And, I was able to reproduce the
404 error when using the REST API. I think it is a bug in the REST API.


> 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.
>

Are you talking about merging Postorius' users or Mailman's users
here?

What I feel is that it would be a useful feature for Postorius. Mailman
already as decoupled users and addresses. In case we want to merge
two users, we can just associate the second user's address with the
first user and delete the second user. Here I am assuming that first
user has priority and his preferences are to be saved.

Whereas in Postorius this is quite a big problem. I don't think we can
add multiple addresses to a django.contrib.auth.User model. Even though
we have a custom MailmanUser model too, but for logging in a user we
depend on django's User model. This means, the user can never login
 to his same account through the alternate address.

What do you think?

-- 
thanks,
Abhilash Raj