Re: [Mailman-Developers] [GSoC 2014] Mailman CLI Project

Barry Warsaw writes:

Also as a general rule, I think we want just one level of subcommand, so that mmclient show --list would be the template. (That's open to discussion.)

I wonder about this in the context of argparse and the command line, because argparse makes a strong distinction (and corresponding associations) between *required positional* arguments and *optional* keyword-like arguments (ie, any argument with leading dashes).

In the model Rajeev has shown so far, the "scope" argument (list, domain, user) hasn't been optional.

mmclient set --key <name> --value <value>

This seems unnecessarily verbose on the one hand, and to not actually correspond to an actual use case, on the other: there's no scope mentioned. I feel the scope should be mandatory, even if it's sitewide:

mmclient set --site-wide --key CAN_PERSONALIZE --value No
mmclient set --domain=python.org --key CAN_PERSONALIZE --value Yes

(after the first one, the second would be an error, I guess, but in other cases a site-wide setting would be interpreted as a default).

I guess this horse has already bolted the barn, but I wonder about a syntax like

mmclient set --site-wide --key PERSONALIZE --value Permitted
mmclient set --domain=python.org --key PERSONALIZE --value Permitted
mmclient set --list=mailman-users@python.org --key PERSONALIZE --value No

for resource constraining settings. (Permitted could probably be an alias for False.)

Steve