[Mailman-Developers] Discussion about Mailman plugins(GSOC 2015)

[Barry Warsaw]

On Mar 05, 2015, at 03:09 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

>I'm really having trouble with this interest in "plugins" as opposed
>to "rules for chains" and "handlers for pipelines".  To install a rule
>or handler is a three-step process done by the site administrator:
>
>1. Write or download a module containing some code using a simple
>   plugin API; the code has access to all Mailman features.
>
>2. Save/copy the module to .../rules or .../handlers.
>
>3. Configure the global pipeline in mailman.cfg or individual
>   pipelines in list configurations.
>
>That looks rather "pluggable" to me.  What does a "plugin" give that
>improves on this process?

Not much, but a little.  Right now you'd have to drop the module into the
rules or handlers subdirectory, but that's a bit of a problem because you're
conflating code provided by Mailman with custom code from the sysadmin.  Think
of a Linux distro package - you really don't want sysadmins messing with the
source tree of Mailman.

Ideally, there would be a way to add additional filesystem -- or Python import
-- paths to the config files which Mailman would then search for additional
rules, handlers, etc.

Right now these search paths are hardcoded, e.g. mailman/core/rules.py.
That's fine for finding the standard rules, but doesn't work so well for
finding custom ones.

This isn't a GSoC sized project on its own though.

Cheers,
-Barry