[Mailman-Developers] Discussion On Project Idea "Preset List Settings Templates" .

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Abhilash Raj writes:

 > I *think* we have had a discussion before about what should be a better
 > default value for member.moderation_action and
 > nonmeember.moderation_action. Instead of just copying them to the field,
 > we could set it to defer in which it case the lookup automatically picks
 > up the value of the list's default_(non)member_action.
 > 
 > Or we could *always* copy the default styles to a new style that the
 > list owner owns and can use for his other lists.

These somewhat analogous to "deep binding" and "shallow binding"
(actually they should be called "deep lookup" and "shallow lookup") in
Lisp implementation.  They can have the same semantics (Mailman can
choose, the point of using Lisp as an example is that the semantics
are defined by the language definition and the implementation must
match that definition), but shallow binding requires more care in
implementation (the binding is basically a cache).  I think probably
shallow binding is the way to go because changing these values is much
less frequent than referencing them.

 > > I wanted to ask that what should be the behavior when a user changes
 > > the 'default_member_action' and 'default_nonmember_action' attributes.
 > > Since, the values of these attributes are copied to the
 > > 'member.moderation_action' at the time of the creation of a new
 > > member. So, any changes made to the 'default_member_action' and
 > > 'default_nonmember_action' attributes will not be reflected in the
 > > already created members which I think may not be the desirable
 > > behavior.

This is easy.  Just think about what happens if you change the
creation default from unmoderated to moderated, and automatically copy
that to an existing list.  Would you want to be that list owner?