[Mailman-Developers] Moderation rules priority

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Barry Warsaw writes:

 > I feel quite strongly that rules should be self-contained and
 > unordered, with ordering imposed by the chain of links that rules
 > are associated with.

I don't understand what you're trying to say here.  Are you saying
that rules should not have a "rules_to_run_before_this_rule" field,
but it's OK if a chain "rule_B, rule_A" is buggy because rule_A should
be run before rule_B?  Of course we should then fix the bug -- the
point is that it is currently very easy for such bugs to occur,
because rules may depend on metadata, and set/change metadata.

Perhaps rules should be allowed to add new metadata, but not change
existing metadata?

I think I already mentioned that I have a difficulty with the concept
of "*pure* Boolean with side effects", too. :-)

N.B. As far as *I* am concerned, you can take your time about
responding to this.  I need to go review the docs and code on all this
anyway.  But I suspect that if *I'm* confused about these concepts,
*others* may be too, and they're pretty fundamental to customizing and
extending Mailman 3.