[meta-sig] RE: [META-SIG] Switchover to mailman

[Ken Manheimer]

I'd like to address robin's specific items, but also note that we
shouldn't go rolling too deep in the technical issues on this list,
since not everyone will necessarily be interested.  Since there seems to
be more than enough interest, we can continue technical mailman
discussions on the new mailman-developers@python.org mailing list (i
suggest waiting a bit to post there, to give people time to subscribe).
I think the meta-sig is the perfect place for things like the
subscription-visibility issue, which is more a question of python.org
and mailing list policy than coding... 

(I hesitated about establishing the mailman-developers list only because
i wanted to wait until john had some time to catch up with events.  He's
busy taking care of some personal matters, but seemed to indicate in
passing that it would be ok in general to go foward in this manner. 
Please let me know, john, if there're any problems with it...) 

On Thu, 26 Feb 1998, Friedrich, Robin K wrote:

> One (of probably several) mailman comment I noticed right away. I didn't
> see a way to simply change the email address for myself (I'm the record
> holder for the longest work address:-(, and I wanted to change this to
> my pythonpros address). The old paradigm is of course to unsubscribe and
> resubscribe under a new address. With this tool it ought to be simple
> (since we have passwords) to directly change the address information in
> place. Just a suggestion.

I'll take a look at it, but it is important to recognize at the outset
one problem in principle.  With mailman, your email address *is* your
account identifier - changing the email address would be analogous in
Unix to having a command you run from your account to change the login
id for the account. I don't know of any systems that provide that,
because you are actually talking about different accounts, not a change
to a single one.

> Also, I'll be happy to tweak the web pages for appearance sake and
> possibly integrate HTMLgen if Ken/John wants. 

I've only scratched the surface in refining the web pages, and i think
there's a lot to be done there.  I'd certainly appreciate help.  My
primary concern is minimizing clutter and emphasizing ease of finding
stuff - simplicity, i think, is crucial here.

There also may be a nice place for HTMLgen where john's custom html
formatting stuff now resides.  I'm not sure - again, i don't think we
need anything very elaborate, but i do see that htmlgen isn't very big,
and might provide more robustness and comprehensiveness to be worth
integration of another package.  Definitely something to consider - and
i like the idea of an expert like you taking a look at what it takes. 
As barry recently suggested, this might be a perfect opportunity for
Bazaar-style development!

> PS. I love it!!

I have to say that i feel the same way.  I don't think it's just my bias
towards python that leads me to think mailman is an enourmous
improvement over majordomo (or anything else i've seen), both in terms
of existing functionality and in terms of ease of further development
and potential.

Ken