[Mailman-Developers] Dropping Persona

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Barry Warsaw writes:

 > Further, I have a strong personal preference for "no user names",
 > or alternatively, using email addresses as their "user name".  I
 > think user names are essentially contrived extra information for
 > which there's no need, when clearly your identity is your email
 > address.

Clearly that's *an* identity, yes, and for social and volunteer sites
it's one of the few things that is operationally verifiable for most
users (except for those wonderfully expressive and mnemonic, not to
mention easy-to-type, PGP keys!), so some email address should be the
"main" user identifier.  OTOH I don't see why a person having an
(optional, additional) nickname is bad.

 > We've long debated, but never attempted, a "centralized user
 > database" component, partly because we can't decide whether that
 > should be a separate piece that the core, Postorius, and HK (and at
 > some point, mailmania) talk to, or whether it should just live in
 > the core.

Another problem is Mailman in the enterprise, which probably has its
own database already.