[Mailman-Developers] Thoughts on splitting qrunner

[Chuq Von Rospach]

At 12:51 PM -0500 12/8/00, Barry A. Warsaw wrote:
>http://www.zope.org/Members/bwarsaw/MailmanDesignNotes/SplittingQrunner
>

I like it.

I'd like to suggest one other thing for qrunner. Make qrunner the 
queue-mom (so to speak), and have it manage what gets spawned when. 
The idea is that we end up with a single cron entry that fires every 
minute. that thing looks around and decides what needs to be spawned 
-- sort of sucking cron into mailman.

Why not use cron? Here are a few reasons:

1) tweaking stuff in cron requires someone with CLI access, so it 
falls on the site admin to do things. By sucking cron into mailman, 
you can add a web access to all of this, which allows it to be 
managed remotely.

2) down the road, I see a strong positive in being able to split this 
stuff out further, on a per-list basis for at least some stuff. the 
current cron-based setup is monolithic to the system, unless you want 
a cron file the size of a small truck, and in that case, maintenance 
is horrific)

3) It makes the whole queing system less sensitive to upgrades 
(either by losing your customizations by re-installing the generic 
cron file, or forgetting to install the updated cronfile, or not 
realizing that the upgrade has a new cron file that needs to be 
merged with your custom changes ot the existing cron processes) -- it 
makes it a lot easier to manage for the admin, plus it allows us as 
developers to write tools to auto-update the queueing stuff if 
needed. With cron -- good luck..

thoughts?

-- 
Chuq Von Rospach - Plaidworks Consulting (mailto:chuqui@plaidworks.com)
Apple Mail List Gnome (mailto:chuq@apple.com)

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