[Mailman-Developers] Changing admin address for "umbrella" list subscribers

[Ken Manheimer]

A while back i implemented a mailman feature to facilitate having
"umbrella" lists to which other lists could be subscribed.  I would
like to change it slightly, and want to see if i'd be messing anybody
up with the change.  I'm not even sure if anybody but me uses the
feature, so first i'll explain what it's about, and then i'll explain
the problem.

The idea is to enable maillists that are composed of only other
maillists, as "subscribers".  That way, announcements of interest to
groups of lists could be sent to the encompassing list.  This may
sound peculiar, but it actually makes sense in the context of, for
example, activities that have regional groups doing their regional
thing, but also occasionally collecting together for, eg, national
conclaves, or for discussions of common issues across the regions,
etc.  (In fact, i'm establishing a network of lists for people who do
something i'm part of, contact improvisation, and this arrangement
looks really pretty good for us.)

The only special provision i had to make for this arrangment is an
admin setting so that the members administrative stuff, like the
monthly password reminders, are _not_ posted to the subscribed lists,
but to their administrators.  I created the 'reminders_to_admins'
option, and set it so that the reminders would go to the
'list-admin@host.domain' account, rather than 'list@host.domain'.
(I'm pretty sure this was pre 1.0b4, so it's been there for a while,
probably unnoticed by most people.)

The problem is that it may be that '-owner' is a more prevalent suffix
for list administrator addresses than '-admin'.  At least, that's what
makelist.com seems to use, and from my probing they don't seem to
support the '-admin' alias, while the policy for mailman is to support
both.  So i'm considering changing the option to go to '-owner'
address instead of '-admin', but before i do that i wanted to find out 
whether (1) anyone already depends on the '-admin' option, and (2)
whether anyone has objections to making the switch, in any case.

(We could add *another* option to designate the suffix, but that
doesn't strike me as a good solution - we'd be better off striving for
some standard, than encouraging fragmentation here.  What good would
one choice or another be if some of the subscriber lists within the
umbrella have one and some have the other?)

Any clear feelings, one way or the other, from anyone?  I plan on
making the change within the next few days, but can still be dissuaded 
by solid arguments...

Ken Manheimer		  klm@python.org	    703 620-8990 x268
	    (orporation for National Research |nitiatives

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