skip@pobox.com writes:
Stephen> If Mailman can do it *better* than cron, that would be another Stephen> matter. That point is arguable, but my personal preference Stephen> would be to provide a generic feature that both cron and other Stephen> possible schedulers could take advantage of.
In fact, it is quite easy to argue that with a programmatic interface and access to cron my "spread out the pain" request is better implemented there.
"There" being in Mailman itself? Or in cron? (It's not obvious to me whether Mailman could do this better internally or not; of course I'd try to do it in cron before looking for a feature in Mailman, but Jack's mileage would vary, I'm sure. :-)
The monthly mailing becomes a daily mailing which only sends reminder notices to a fraction of the users.
Indeed, or weekly, or even 4x daily, and providing that kind of flexibility of timing is something that cron has a lot of existing support for. OTOH, somebody still has to write the code to manage the partial lists. However, that code might be useful for other purposes (eg, if a user who refers to the member list page often wants it split into 4 equal-sized pages rather than 27 pages of wildly varying size). (The above is what I mean by "generic features", and an example of how they might be applied.)