Hi folks,
I manage Helix Community, which makes pretty heavy use of Mailman as integrated into GForge. I'm moderately familiar with Mailman code, and pretty familiar with GForge. Of course, Perl is my native tongue, so I'm equally uncomfortable in both codebases ;-)
Anyway, one thing that my users are constantly clamoring for is features that would come from tighter integration between GForge and Mailman. I've been mulling this over for a while, and it seems that deep integration is limited by the way that most Mailman data is stored in pickles. Since GForge is coded and pretty heavily bound to PHP.
My options for integration between the two seem to be:
- Implement alternate GForge authentication mechanism in Mailman
- Implement alternate, PHP-compatible storage mechanism (e.g. SQL database) for everything currently stored in pickles
- Implement pickle support in PHP
- Implement IPC mechanism (e.g. SOAP, XML-RPC) as a Mailman control daemon, and call that from GForge
I'm wondering if there are recommendations from this group. I'm also wondering if there have been any movements/efforts in any of these directions already.
This is one of many problems that I plan to work on over time, and plan to contribute patches to the extent that they are useful to a larger community. If I'm lucky, I'll get budget to hire developers for this, but for now, I'll be doing this on the cheap.
Thoughts? Rob
Rob Lanphier, Development Support Manager - RealNetworks Helix Community: http://helixcommunity.org Development Support: http://www.realnetworks.com/products/support/devsupport