[Mailman-Developers] GSOC'15: Improving styles for lists
Stephen J. Turnbull
stephen at xemacs.org
Thu Mar 19 07:31:53 CET 2015
prakhar joshi writes:
> I am thinking of storing the styles in the database by creating a
> table for the styles in the db
Mailman's databases are not relational dbs, they're object-oriented.
Underneath the objects are stored in relational dbs and managed by an
ORM (SQLAlchemy), of course, but the Mailman API is object-based.
If you want to think of your schema in terms of tables, I don't think
you'll have any trouble in design, but when you get to the
implementation stage you'll have to shift gears to OODB style.
> and this table will contain all the attributes of a style and these
> entries can be null too. So a table which will contain a style name
> with all its attributes. Now as we have table for mailing list
> containing all the attributes in the mailing list table. So now the
> style table will contain all these attributes and in the mailing
> list table we will just store the mailing list name and the style
> name and this way we can connect the two table by providing foreign
> key of style_id to the mailing list table?
I think this is probably not the best way to go. Some of the
attributes change over time, some attributes flip back and forth, and
so on. Some lists may have a unique combination not very useful for
other lists/list owners. So I think a library of templates so that
you can set many attributes at once by applying a template is a better
way to go. Also, I suspect it would be useful to allow very incomplete
templates so that you could apply template A to get the basic
character, then apply template B (which is very incomplete and only
changes two attributes) to get the effect you want.
I haven't thought about it carefully, so don't just assume everything
I wrote is right. Maybe it will be useful for refining your proposal.
More information about the Mailman-Developers
mailing list