A Simple Conference Utility Program?

[Peter Hansen]

Steve Holden wrote:
> 
> Just a quickie.

And apparently too much even at that. ;-)

> Suppose we have a number of registered delegates for a conference, and
> we want to publish a list of the names of only those who confirm, by
> sending an email to a specific address, that they wish their names to be
> published.
> 
> Obviously emails that do not come from an address registered in the
> database should be ignored. We can maybe ignore the risk of spamming,
> though any anti-spam measures to make the email address more secure
> would be useful. [Next year we'll have them choose passwords when they
> register...]
> 
> Given that all data can comfortably be held in memory, and starting with
> a list of (name, email, False) triples, how much Python does it take to
> maintain and publish a list of confirmed delegates?
> 
> [name may actually be (firstname, lastname)].

I find the question a little vague, but I'm replying anyway in the hopes
that it might inspire a little more discussion here.

Steve, would this be an appropriate topic for a mini-sprint or at least
a brief requirements analysis session at the convention itself?  Or were
you hoping to get it in place for this year?

What does "publish" mean to you?  On paper?  To the web?  Don't care?

Are you talking about manually taking the emails and enter the confirmations
in a "database" (i.e. text file)?  Or having Python retrieve and harvest 
the emails itself?  Or act as the mail server?  Or ?

At first glance, the answer (to the "how much Python" question) would seem
to be just "not much!" but I can't see that that helps you much, and it
seems obvious enough that either I'm missing something, or you didn't
communicate what you had in mind well enough.

-Peter