[Mailman3-dev] Suggested feature: direct & enhanced "umbrella list" support

[Barry Warsaw]

On Mon, 2004-03-15 at 11:28, Mitchell Marks wrote:
> The MM2 handling of sublists/superlists is largely by subscribing a
> sublist address as a member of the superlist, or by periodically running a
> script to reconstitute the superlist by merging the addresses from the
> sublists.  The specific support built into MM2 for these situations does
> not seem to go much beyond the "umbrella list" attribute which affects how
> reminders are handled.

I've had a rough idea for a feature I'm calling "rosters".  Think of
them as a level of indirection between members and lists.  For example,
a list could be composed of several rosters, the list owners could be a
roster, etc.  It's only a vague notion at the moment, but here's how
some of your suggestions would pan out:

> I'd very much welcome some way of having that type of relationship more
> inherently recognized.  Suppose I could designate that "Seniors",
> "Juniors", and "Sophs" constituted "Students".  Then:
> 
>   -- someone getting subscribed to Seniors will start receiving mail sent
>      to Students immediately (or as soon as they start receiving Seniors
>      mail)
> 
>   -- When a message goes through Students, recipients via the sublist will
> get a Subject line tag like [Students] but not the whole stack
> "[Seniors][Students]".
>    OR make that configurable.

I think, not configurable.  The idea behind rosters is that it's mostly
just a mechanism for discovering the list of recipients for a particular
mailing.  Thus it's possible the Students list had no roster of its own,
but was composed from the Fresh, Soph, Jr, and Sr rosters.  A message to
Students then would get decorated with all the Students list chrome, and
the de-duped union of all four rosters would get the message.  A message
then to the Seniors list would be chromed for Seniors and only that
roster would get th emessage.

>   -- When a recipient of a Students message through the Seniors sublist
> goes to reply (assuming list-reply rather than individual-poster-reply is
> on), should that mean Seniors or Students?

Students, because the /message/ went to the Students list even though
the recipients were calculated from the Seniors list.

>   -- Suppose for some reason a student is on both Juniors and Seniors
> lists.  A message that comes through Students should probably result in
> only one copy going to that dual-subscribed person.

Yes.

>   -- If an individual is subscribed directly to the Students superlist,
> the system should treat them as an individual and not as a sublist,l for
> such matters as reminders and bounce handling.  (That's roughly like
> saying the MM2 "umbrella list" attribute should be applied not to the
> superlist but per-subscriber, marking whether the subscriber is a list or
> an individual.)

Yes, if the Students list has a separate roster.

-Barry