Re: [Mailman-Developers] Discussion about Mailman plugins(GSOC 2015)
Please keep traffic on-list, unless it's security-related or truly personal. Replying to list.
Prakash kumar writes:
What does a "plugin" give that improves on this process?
The only problem that I find is, we need to implement a framework for loading, unloading and communication of plugins.
We have such a framework already, and since the only person who will be using it is the site admin (see below), I really don't see why the command-line-based download-copy-configure process is excessively burdensome.
Loading and unloading plugins are better than going to code and making changes for every requirement.
Somebody has to write the code. Once it's written, you just copy the module into place, and no code needs to be written.
It will also help new developers to write plugins without actually understanding the complex coding of mailman.
I can't imagine an interesting plugin that requires no understanding of Mailman internals. Theming web interfaces, sure, but that's not part of Mailman core anymore, that would for Postorius or HyperKitty or some other application. What kind of thing are you thinking about? Is it really appropriate for a mailing list (vs a blog or web forum)?
I think it will be better if we can give the users
What users? See next comments.
ability to load and unload plugins without touching the source code
We already have that, for values of "user" == site admin. With a prewritten plugin (handler or rule), the only Python you need to know is the syntax of Python lists and strings, and maybe not even that.
means from the web ui like in wordpress.
I think this is very unlikely to happen. No sane site admin would enable such a feature in Mailman as currently implemented, because once you have a Python module, you have access to pretty much everything inside of Mailman. For example, you could write a plugin that looks for private or no-archive lists, saves a month of posts to disk, and then spews the lot to Twitter (after checking the language and spewing to Weibo instead for Chinese).
The only thing I can think of would be nice to have, maybe the site admin could install the handlers/rules manually as now, but add a feature to Postorius to allow manipulation of the pipeline from the web UI so that handlers or rules could be enabled selectively for individual lists. Again I'm not sure that a sane site admin would allow this from the web UI, because manipulating the pipeline or rules can have a large impact on performance and correctness of behavior. If a poorly ordered pipeline caused a list to go rogue, that could affect the reputation of the whole site.
I want to implement plugin with features:-
- Using regex for filtering texts ( personal information eg: phone number, address ).
- Checking type of files that can be attached to the mails. For eg: .exe not allowed.
- If there are multiple attachments in the email
If (multiple attachments) then
for each attachment if(not appropriate) then discard notify sender that this part is removed from email body and why else continue
Is it big enough for a gsoc proposal?
What else I can add to it?
On Thu, Mar 5, 2015 at 7:16 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen@xemacs.org> wrote:
Please keep traffic on-list, unless it's security-related or truly personal. Replying to list.
Prakash kumar writes:
What does a "plugin" give that improves on this process?
The only problem that I find is, we need to implement a framework for loading, unloading and communication of plugins.
We have such a framework already, and since the only person who will be using it is the site admin (see below), I really don't see why the command-line-based download-copy-configure process is excessively burdensome.
Loading and unloading plugins are better than going to code and making changes for every requirement.
Somebody has to write the code. Once it's written, you just copy the module into place, and no code needs to be written.
It will also help new developers to write plugins without actually understanding the complex coding of mailman.
I can't imagine an interesting plugin that requires no understanding of Mailman internals. Theming web interfaces, sure, but that's not part of Mailman core anymore, that would for Postorius or HyperKitty or some other application. What kind of thing are you thinking about? Is it really appropriate for a mailing list (vs a blog or web forum)?
I think it will be better if we can give the users
What users? See next comments.
ability to load and unload plugins without touching the source code
We already have that, for values of "user" == site admin. With a prewritten plugin (handler or rule), the only Python you need to know is the syntax of Python lists and strings, and maybe not even that.
means from the web ui like in wordpress.
I think this is very unlikely to happen. No sane site admin would enable such a feature in Mailman as currently implemented, because once you have a Python module, you have access to pretty much everything inside of Mailman. For example, you could write a plugin that looks for private or no-archive lists, saves a month of posts to disk, and then spews the lot to Twitter (after checking the language and spewing to Weibo instead for Chinese).
The only thing I can think of would be nice to have, maybe the site admin could install the handlers/rules manually as now, but add a feature to Postorius to allow manipulation of the pipeline from the web UI so that handlers or rules could be enabled selectively for individual lists. Again I'm not sure that a sane site admin would allow this from the web UI, because manipulating the pipeline or rules can have a large impact on performance and correctness of behavior. If a poorly ordered pipeline caused a list to go rogue, that could affect the reputation of the whole site.
participants (2)
-
Prakash kumar -
Stephen J. Turnbull