[Mailman-Users] Stupid newbie request

[Brad Knowles]

At 11:42 AM -0400 2006-08-27, Bob Landman wrote:

>  I think this is "the" problem.  The writers must have assumed that
>  everyone has access to command line.  I don't as I use a commercial
>  website which hosts Mailman as a service.

Mailman was never intended to be run as a commercial service, or 
underneath a virtual hosting system, etc....  It was always intended 
to be a program that you ran for yourself on your own mailing list 
management server(s), and where you would have full privileged 
command-line access to the machine in question.

We know that this is not how Mailman is being used today, but you're 
talking about making fundamental changes at the core of the system, 
and it's going to take a while to get all these kinds of things 
updated.

We know that the solutions outlined in the FAQ are not as good as 
they should be, but they're the best we can do at the moment.

>  Groan - they aren't kidding.  I think that's very telling.  And a very
>  ugly solution when you have hundreds of subscribers as I do AND when the
>  list crashes at the website provider (and of course their backup was
>  corrupted as the script wasn't backing up the Mailman subscriber list).
>  Murphy's Law you know.

Well, Mailman was not intended to be used as a hosted service.  And 
you should have good backups for everything you do.  If you were 
using Mailman at a hosting provider that was responsive and doing 
their job correctly, then even these issues should not have impacted 
you and your list members.


So, you're paying someone else to use a rented hammer to drive in 
screws, and they apparently don't know how to properly use a hammer. 
Something has gone wrong, and now you're blaming the hammer 
manufacturer for your problems.

Do you see something wrong with this picture?

>  Please, won't someone provide this feature?  It's basic to list
>  administration.

We're working on it, but there's a lot more stuff that has to be 
changed behind the scenes than you realize.  There's some stuff that 
is higher priority.  And since this is an open-source project, people 
work on the stuff they like/want/need, and not necessarily what other 
people like/want/need.

You could help fix that problem by developing and contributing Python 
code to resolve this matter, or by getting someone else to develop 
and contribute that for you.  Otherwise, it's an open-source project, 
and you have to wait for the developers to decide that this is now at 
the top of their heap.

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad at stop.mail-abuse.org>

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

     -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
     Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755

  Founding Individual Sponsor of LOPSA.  See <http://www.lopsa.org/>.