[Mailman-Developers] Small change to REST API for held subscription requests

[Barry Warsaw]

On Mar 23, 2015, at 08:39 PM, Andrew Stuart wrote:

>Any thoughts on how we could integrate with LDAP?

The intent is that the user database could be backed by, or augmented by LDAP,
although that is currently a goal, not reality.

>Maybe of Mailman had some sort of event notification hook system for when
>users add/edit/delete.  Or if there was some sort of generalised message bus
>within the system that funnels messages about changes to the user database.
>Something sort of LDAP synch process could then use those to synchronise an
>LDAP database. An event hook or message queue would allow changes to the
>users to be immediately pushed into LDAP.

Internally, Mailman does use zope.events to signal things nonlocally to other
parts of the system.  For example, events get fired when the configuration
changes, or when a message gets accepted.  Some of those events are connected
to handlers, but others are just waiting to be used by some future plugin or
other.  It's cheap to add events and handlers.

For users though we don't have much atm.  Just a PasswordChangeEvent and an
unsubscribe event.  There's no reason why we couldn't add more to help with
external user database synchronization.

>Maybe the other possibility is some sort of direct integration such that
>Mailman, if given details of an LDAP server, can directly make changes to the
>LDAP system each time a user is added/edited/deleted.

The other point is that the use of interfaces and the Zope Component
Architecture (ZCA) is supposed to provide a layer of abstraction that could be
used as plug points for integrating with other backends.

Think of the IUserManager.  The existing implementation of that interface is
mailman.model.usermanager.UserManager, and it stores user information in the
local SQL database.  This connection between interface and implementation is
through src/mailman/config/configure.zcml.  Since there's only one user
manager in the system, it's defined as a utility:

  <utility
    provides="mailman.interfaces.usermanager.IUserManager"
    factory="mailman.model.usermanager.UserManager"
    />

Thus when the code calls getUtility(IUserManager) and gets back the built-in
UserManager object, after that, everything works through the interface.  You
could conceivably create a plugin with your own LDAP backed UserManager,
change the utility connection, and then the rest of Mailman would just keep on
working.

In theory of course.  No one to my knowledge has actually tried to explore
these ideas.

Cheers,
-Barry
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 819 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-developers/attachments/20150324/27b17182/attachment.sig>