[Mailman-Developers] ZODB and ZEO for mailman

[Jim Hebert]

On Tue, 20 Jun 2000, Chuq Von Rospach wrote:

> I'm thinking, at first glance, that if you do a Zope integration, 
> when you come out the other side, you don't have Mailman any more, 

Ah, here's where I kick myself for throwing out the post I was going to
write the other day during the pipermail thread. =)

I agree with that, but at the same time I think (as you do, I think, see
what I've quoted below) that with the right OO strategies you can come up
with a large number of classes, the ones that do a lot of the low-level
work, that are common to both. I (embarrasingly) haven't taken the time to
try to draw up what such a interface would look like, for all I know the
existing class structure for Mailman is perfect and what I'm describing is
just additional code rather than changes to existing stuff. =)

> In fact, with a little thinking, you can build a system that is a 
> hotmail clone, an egroups clone, and handles mailman's functionality, 
> all together. A little thinking (hah!) and a lot of work...

Indeed, though whereas you're thinking "all together" I may be thinking of
a separation of packages like, say,

mailman-libs: the common set, as above
mailman-db-adapter(s): the db abstraction, like J C mentioned
mailman-zope: the stuff to implement lots-o-stuff in zope (see my prev msg)
mailman-?: the stuff to implement the traditional stuff as cgi's, etc

That's a mighty tall suggestion relative to the amount of code I've
written, I know. =) I'm sure Barry is reading all of this and slapping his
forehead like "Oy! More work? Easy for them to say!" =)

If I should just leave mailman out of this and go subscribe to a zope list
and talk about a from-scratch effort there, a tap with a LART is all it'll
take. =)

jim
who had thought about trying to go off and write a mlm in zope all by
himself for all of about 10 seconds. =)

-- 
Jim Hebert                                       http://www.cosource.com/
jim@cosource.com          The cooperative market for open source software

"Well actually I was considering opening a market in flying pigs. Mostly
because it would be more practical...." -- Alan Cox