[Mailman3-dev] Re: Umbrella Lists --> CMS

[Dario Lopez-Kästen]

Dale Newfield wrote:
> 
> We need to distinguish between authentication source and data source...
> ...you may want to use LDAP for authentication, but when you want to store
> mailman-specific information (bounce score, for example), the installation
> may want to store that info in SQL.
> 


Very simplified:

I would very much like to have the following distinctions, at the very 
least on a *logical* level:

* user-source
	what users do we have

* authentication-source
	how to authenticate users

* authorisation-source
	how to get users' permissions to access resources

* property-source
	how to access properties (metadata) on users

* group-source
	how to put users into groups

* mapping-source
	how to map users from one source to another.

These source can be aggregatem ie. I can have several authetication 
source, preferably in a cascaded sort of way, etc.

AFAICT, this covers pretty much everything we need to know about users.

List-membership is deduced from group membership, ie. a group can have 
one or more lists associated to it.

umbrella-lists are implemented by groups having other groups as members.

IMHO, this gives us all the expressive power we need to manage lists - 
specialised membership rules can be either deduced from membership in 
groups or from the authorisation source(s). Anything else, such as 
dealing with special features for special cases, complicates things too 
much, and does not always necessitate a technical solution - perhaps 
they can be solved by clever usage of existing feratures.

This is the part that Mailman shpouild borrow the most from CMS systems 
and other multiuser systems. The publishing part is not that hard to do 
either, just make it easy to associate pages with groups and lists, and 
provide a neato-interface to edit them TTW, with a neato templating 
laguage... (disclaimer: I am a zope-fanatic :-).

Cheers,

/dario


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Dario Lopez-Ka"sten, IT Systems & Services Chalmers University of Tech.