Mailman 3 July 1999 - Mailman-Developers

internationalization of Mailman
by Romain GRIFFITHS July 30, 1999

July 30, 1999

I am french and i need to translate -at least- all the member and user part in French. I noticed that all of the message that are not in the templates are hard-coded into mailman. I am ready to translate the member and user message to french but i need to know how i can do that. We'd like the translation to be easily adapted to next versions of mailman. In the archive someone seem to have started i8n with GNU gettext to spanish, i'd like to do same for french if no one has done it yet. But i need to be sure that french translation will be compatible with next versions of mailman. Currently i don't see any .mo ou .mo file in mailman rc3 dist. Where can i find the framework to implement i8n ? PS: I need to have a quick answer because i have a deadline of 4 days to finish the mailing-list in my society (ZDNet France). _________________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com

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Face lift for User Interface
by Dan Delaney July 29, 1999

July 29, 1999

Hi all. Being a graphic designer I'm particularly interested in the "look and feel" of the interface for Mailman. The current interface is pretty good, certainly better than most I've used. But it could use some improvement. With that in mind, I've made a mockup page for the General Options page. For those who are interested, and especially those who actually work on the HTML for the interface, please take a look at www.Dionysia.org/temp/mailman/ and see what you think. Thanks. --Dan ________________________________________________________________________ Dionysos(a)Dionysia.org Daniel G. Delaney www.Dionysia.org/~dionysos/ PGP Public Key: /~dionysos/pgp.html

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Configurable Archiving Proposal
by Paul Hebble July 29, 1999

July 29, 1999

Hi all, I want to set up Mailman to support other archiving methods, more cleanly than subscribing a procmailrc to a list. I know a few other people are interested in this as well. I would like to add a per-list configuration option to each list's config.db which tells Mailman a command line to run to archive a message. Is this any more complicated than adding a variable to the MailList class and adding a few lines to Archiver/Archiver.py? What do other users and developers think of this idea? Is it dangerous to allow a list adminstrator to execute arbitrary commands? If so, how else could this be done? -- Paul

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Re: Subject Cleanup Routine
by Dan Delaney July 29, 1999

July 29, 1999

From: Harald Meland > So, if I send a mail with subject > Subject: Administrivia: [foo] will be changed to [bar] > Mailman should change it to > Subject: [foo] Administrivia: will be changed to [bar] > > ? I don't think messing with the subject prefix to that extent is a > good idea. First, how often are you really gonna put the list's prefix in the subject of a message to the list? Not very often. Maybe once in the lifetime of the list, if that often? Second, even if you do need to refer to the list name in the subject, you could just use quotes instead of brackets, as in: Subject: [foo] Administrivia: "foo" will be changing to "bar" I don't think that's really that big a deal. > Regarding stripping of consecutive "Re:" and "Fwd:" > strings -- you'd still have problems with the nationalized versions of > these ("SV:", "AD:", etc.) that some MUA vendors in their infinite > wisdom have implemented That's a good point. Maybe on the options page there could be a list of "subject tags" to strip from the subjects, instead of having them hard coded in the program. > I think this "problem" should be solved in the user's MUA > configuration (if the user wants the subjects mangled) and/or in the > archiver thread generator. Unfortunately the MUAs out there do a crappy job of this. Look at how many messages you get with things like "Re: Fwd: RE:" in the subject. I get a lot, and it's awefully annoying. Anyway. What would be nice would be a radio button option in the General Options to choose between the existing routine, which simply checks to see if the Prefix is already present in the subject, and a the more aggressive subject cleanup routine. Here, by the way, is a new copy of the routine which takes into account those aweful NUMBERED reply tags (as in "Re[2]:"): --------------------------------------------------------------------------- # Prepend the subject_prefix to the subject line. subj = msg.getheader('subject') prefix = self.subject_prefix # If there's no subject, give it one if not subj: msg.SetHeader('Subject', '%s(no subject)' % prefix) else: # Delete all occurances of the prefix from the subject if prefix: subj = re.sub(re.escape(self.subject_prefix), '', subj) # Check to see if the message is a reply or forward prefix2 = '' if re.search('^fwd*[0-9\[\]]*: |\(fwd\)', subj, re.I): prefix2 = 'Fwd: ' if re.match('re[0-9\[\]]*: ', subj, re.I): prefix2 = 'Re: ' # Clean up all that 're:' and 'fwd: ' garbage subj = re.sub('[rR][eE][0-9\[\]]*: | *\(*[fF][wW][dD]*[0-9\[\]\)]*:* *', '', subj) # Set the new subject line in place msg.SetHeader('Subject', '%s%s%s' % (prefix, prefix2, subj)) --------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- Dan ________________________________________________________________________ Dionysos(a)Dionysia.org Daniel G. Delaney www.Dionysia.org/~dionysos/ PGP Public Key: /~dionysos/pgp.html

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Re: [Mailman-Developers] RE: Mailman-Developers digest, Vol 1 #328 - 6 msgs
by Harald Meland July 29, 1999

July 29, 1999

[Ken Manheimer] > I agree with everyone's admiration for your changes. Yeah, even _I_ like'em :) > I have one reservation, however - i much prefer the existing > arrangement, if not necessarily the appearance, of the activity > index at the top of the page. I think the regular matrix you use is > too regular - i'd prefer the links to the configuration options > pages to be more clearly separate from the "other" activities. Like, in a separate frame, maybe? That's what I've been thinking, anyway... However, the frame-full UI should be optional. For a frame-less UI, I agree with Ken. > I think having them in two separate columns, as we currently do, is > not a bad arrangement - though i can see how it can be incongruous > with everything else being arranged in tables. Umm, I'm definitely _not_ a graphic designer (by far), but wouldn't a borderless table with one row of two columns, where each column contains a bordered/coloured table corresponding to the "columns" we have now, work nicely? -- Harald

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RE: Mailman-Developers digest, Vol 1 #328 - 6 msgs
by Ken Manheimer July 29, 1999

July 29, 1999

> From: "Dan Delaney" <Dionysos(a)Dionysia.org> > To: <mailman-developers(a)python.org> > Date: Tue, 27 Jul 1999 16:59:33 -0400 > charset="iso-8859-1" > Subject: [Mailman-Developers] Face lift for User Interface > > Hi all. > Being a graphic designer I'm particularly interested in the "look and > feel" of the interface for Mailman. The current interface is pretty good, > certainly better than most I've used. But it could use some improvement. > With that in mind, I've made a mockup page for the General Options page. > For those who are interested, and especially those who actually work on > the HTML for the interface, please take a look at > www.Dionysia.org/temp/mailman/ and see what you think. I agree with everyone's admiration for your changes. I have one reservation, however - i much prefer the existing arrangement, if not necessarily the appearance, of the activity index at the top of the page. I think the regular matrix you use is too regular - i'd prefer the links to the configuration options pages to be more clearly separate from the "other" activities. I think having them in two separate columns, as we currently do, is not a bad arrangement - though i can see how it can be incongruous with everything else being arranged in tables. I also have a logistical reservation about the 70-character-wide text entry boxes at the bottom. One thing we've been thinking about for improving navigation through mailman, in general, is use of a sidebar and a "top"bar. This would use up some of the real estate needed for hard-wrapped, full width text entry boxes. (We've also been thinking about how we would make mailman "play nicely" with the existing style of a host site, another potential real-estate loss, but this is getting pretty hypothetical.) I just mention this to enter it into the picture... (BTW, i guess i'm primarily responsible for the existing layout of many of the mailman pages - though really, i refined/reworked to greater and lesser degrees what i originally got from john viega, and based some of my changes on contributions, particularly from robin friedrich. And i have to admit to a possibly stubborn liking of the "cumbersome white lines", which nicely delineate the options, to my eye. That said, i think the only real reservation i have is the one concerning the activity index at the top, and would be happy to go with all your other changes - thanks!!) Ken Manheimer klm(a)digicool.com

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message board functionality?
by Steven Hazel July 29, 1999

July 29, 1999

wwwthreads, a web-based threaded message board software, formerly released under the GPL, is now being released under a non-free license by the original author. I'm the administrator of wwwthreads for a user community, and we've decided to stick with free software. I suggested to the GNU project that I fork the code and work on extending and improving the capabilies of wwwthreads with the aim of inclusion in GNU. After a bit of discussion with RMS, I'm thinking that perhaps the best thing to do is to work on GNU Mailman to make it capable of doing what wwwthreads does. Many of the extensions I was planning for wwwthreads (for example, integration with email and optionalization of the web interface) are already done in Mailman, and I think that maybe Mailman could benefit from some of the additional functionality I am proposing. Besides which, I'd really like to be able to deal with all of my email in one place, rather than having to zoom off to some web site for a portion of it. I think a lot of web-based-forum users feel the same way. So I'm writing this email to find out what you think -- is this possible? Is it a good idea? My current minimum list of features needed to make GNU Mailman useable as a replacement for wwwthreads (with the web-based part fully optional) is as follows: - web logins for user accounts - user option to not actually receive mail from lists (for those who want to read lists purely on the web) - web interface for posting to mailing lists - web interface for administrator and moderator functions - web appearance configurability on both an administrator and user level - program to convert wwwthreads databases to Mailman configurations Of course, further features would follow those, based on what users say when they've switched from other forum software. I expect that the web frontend would benefit greatly. Your comments are appriciated. -Steven

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French Templates
by Romain GRIFFITHS July 29, 1999

July 29, 1999

We did the translation of the templates to french. We need to correct them a bit but it is ok _____________________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Free instant messaging and more at http://messenger.yahoo.com

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Re: [Mailman-Developers] Face lift for User Interface
by Nigel Metheringham July 28, 1999

July 28, 1999

I also like the mockup interface, and would like the idea of making large chunks of this template-able - ie colour selection etc. At the risk of this becoming a general wish-list as well, I would also like finer control of some of the current information emitted by the mailman web interface. For example I have just changed the owner information for one of my lists so that it is delivered direct to my work mail account, and also has a mailbox suffix on it to enable it to be sorted automatically. This makes the address long, ugly, and I intended it for use by the stuff forwarded by mailman. However this now appears on the bottom of all the web pages (... list run by...). I don't appear to be able to remove that without dropping the <MM-Mailman-Footer> tag from the pages, which is more extensive a change than I want. So finer control of these elements would also be advantageous. Nigel. -- [ Nigel Metheringham Nigel.Metheringham(a)VData.co.uk ] [ Phone: +44 1423 850000 Fax +44 1423 858866 ]

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Re: [Mailman-Developers] Face lift for User Interface
by J C Lawrence July 28, 1999

July 28, 1999

On Tue, 27 Jul 1999 16:59:33 -0400 Dan Delaney <Dionysos(a)Dionysia.org> wrote: > www.Dionysia.org/temp/mailman/ I like. -- J C Lawrence Home: claw(a)kanga.nu ---------(*) Linux/IA64 - Work: claw(a)varesearch.com ... Beware of cromagnons wearing chewing gum and palm pilots ...

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