[Mailman-Developers] XML-RPC interface to mailman

[Joseph Tate]

I've created a patch to Mailman to add XML-RPC based remote procedure
calls to mailman.  This is just a first cut to show that it can be
done and to do a few basic operations I need to plug it into a kind of
hosting framework so it can be controlled from a separate web server. 
I plan to add functionality to it to fully meet my needs, but I
thought I'd throw it out there so that I can get some feedback.  It's
made against a pristine 2.1.6 tarball.

In order to reuse code, I had to refactor quite a few files.  Most
notably some of the Cgi interfaces that do real work were tied very
closely to the idea that you want to output HTML.  You don't with
XML-RPC, so I split out the work from the formatting and replaced said
formatting with some exception handling.  I welcome comments on this
part of the patch.  I'd like to know how to make this better.

You can see that I handle authentication in each XML-RPC call that
needs it, so it shouldn't be any less secure than the appropriate Cgi
call.

Finally, I'd like some discussion of licensing.  I think that the
xmlrpc.py file itself should be LGPL just so that there is no
ambiguity whatsoever about using XML-RPC calls from a non-GPL
application.  However part of me thinks that this is unnecessary
because there is no import required to use XML-RPC, and therefore,
calling these functions would not be considered "linking" in any
technical sense of the word, and therefore would not require making
the calling application GPL.  Thoughts?

-- 
Joseph Tate
Personal e-mail: jtate AT dragonstrider DOT com
Web: http://www.dragonstrider.com
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