On 28-Feb-08, at 4:40 PM, Jennifer Redman wrote:

3. Has anyone developed something similar in the past few years which provides similar functionality that may be an acceptable alternative?

How similar is this to the Topic functionality that's around now?
(all messages matching a topic regex can be subscribed to/ unsubscribed from.) I'm guessing the big difference is that your
dynamic sublists are generated, well, dynamically? Would it be
possible to just put in some code to generate the topics
automatically and have that meet your needs?

Terri

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On Feb 28, 2008, at 4:40 PM, Jennifer Redman wrote:

Hello!

I Jennifer,

The Systers (http://anitaborg.org/initiatives/systers/) community
uses a modified version of Mailman that extends functionality to include
dynamic sublists (a person can chose to unsubscribe to individual
conversations if they are not interested, without removing themselves from the main
list).

Very cool. I remember talking with Ellen about this years ago.

The extension has been running well for the last 4+ years, but it's
time to sync to the current version of Mailman to remedy some problems with
the upgrade path, security concerns, and bugs that have appeared due to
bit rot.

The original project is located here:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/dsub/

Ellen Spertus, the author of the extensions, posted previously many
years ago -- around 2002 if you'd like to search for the original threads.

My questions for the Mailman Development Community:

1. Is there any interest in helping us bring the code up to date?

Without looking at the code, I think this should be done as part of
Mailman 2.2's development. But you could start by merging the code
with the head of the Mailman 2.1 branch. Once it applies cleanly to
2.1 it should be pretty easy to apply to 2.2 once the latter is
brought current.

It can't go into 2.1 because it's a new feature. I'm really hoping
that 2.1.10 will be one of the last 2.1 releases and that we'll start
focussing on 2.2 and 3.0 from then on.

It would be neat to see how the same ideas could be applied to 3.0,
but I suspect the implementation would be fairly significantly
different.

2. Is the correct first step to create an unofficial branch and move
   the project into Launchpad under the auspices of the Mailman project?

You don't need official Mailman project blessing to do the first
steps. I think it would be enough to create a team and project on
Launchpad, bzr branch the Mailman 2.1 tree, port your code to the
branch, then push the branch into the team's code area. Mailman's
code pillar should notice that the branches are related and show up
automatically under its Code tab.

Be sure to edit this page though: http://wiki.list.org/display/DEV/MailmanBranches

I'm happy to chat with you on irc (#mailman on freenode) if you have
any questions getting this set up!

3. Has anyone developed something similar in the past few years which provides similar functionality that may be an acceptable alternative?

I think Tokio's sibling lists might be in the same ballpark.

4. What steps would we need to take to get the extensions included
   upstream?

First let's get a working branch on Launchpad, then we can review the
code. Ultimately, we'll need FSF assignment papers for any
significant patch (which it sounds like this is) from all copyright
owners. Other than that, if it's a cool feature then I think 100k
euros (sorry, US dollar <snif>) to each of Mark, Tokio and I in bags
of small, unmarked coins should do it. :)

just-kidding-about-the-bribe-ly y'rs,

• -Barry

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