[Mailman-Users] Changing mailing list URLs

[Mark Sapiro]

Eli Barzilay wrote:

>Is there a way to change mailing list URLs from
>
>  ...something.../<verb>/<list>
>
>to
>
>  ...something.../<list>/<verb>
>
>?
>
>Hopefully also with making `listinfo' be the default verb so that
>...something.../<list> is just that page.
>
>(I can obviously do that in the apache configuration, but the
>generated urls are still what mailman wants and in addition it seems
>that it messes up the authentication somehow.)


There are several issues involved. First, there is for example a

ScriptAlias /mailman/ "/usr/local/mailman/cgi-bin/"

in the Apache config. This says that for a URL like
http://www.example.com/mailman/xxx/yyy/zzz..., run the CGI
/usr/local/mailman/cgi-bin/xxx, and put the remainder of the URL path
(yyy/zzz...) in the environment in PATH_INFO.

Thus, Apache will invoke Mailman's xxx wrapper which checks the
appropriate calling group and invokes Mailman's scrips/driver with its
name (xxx) as the first argument.

The driver in turn imports Mailman/Cgi/xxx.py and calls its main()
function which then looks at PATH_INFO in the environment to determine
what list (yyy) was and additional information (zzz...) was provided.

If you could figure out a way within Apache to redirect URLs of the form

  ...something.../<list>/<verb>

to

  ...something.../<verb>/<list>

without then turning around and redirecting the second back to the
first in an endless loop, it would still only partially work because
posting of forms would not work because the form data would get lost
in the redirect. Perhaps this is what you meant by "in addition it
seems that it messes up the authentication somehow"

So I don't think that there is a way to do this without making
significant modifications to Mailman and having a CGI wrapper per list
instead of the current 11 wrappers corresponding to the 11 possible
"verbs".

-- 
Mark Sapiro <mark at msapiro.net>        The highway is for gamblers,
San Francisco Bay Area, California    better use your sense - B. Dylan