[Mailman-Developers] Huge lists

[Chuq Von Rospach]

At 7:38 PM -0700 5/25/2000, J C Lawrence wrote:

>While true, that's a sticky wicket.  Mailman is MTA agnostic (a Good
>Thing).


Yes.

>   Yup, you can build all sorts of intelligence and queue
>handling techniques in, but the more you do there, the less and less
>clean (or possible) your abstractions are going to be, and the more
>you are going to tie yourself into a specific configuration.

So -- let's don't. Instead, use some simple throttle values (number 
of parallel threads delivering into the MTA would do 90% of the job, 
but some #addrs/period-of-time throttle might not be a bad idea, but 
simply saying "the MTA can handle so many parallel deliveries" does 
most of the job.

The rest, which is how to set up your MTA and tune the MLM's 
connection to it, then boils down to a set of READMEs or HOWTOs. Keep 
it out of the code completely.

>We could, without too too much effort, whack Mailman into being,
>say, Postfix specific and actively conspiring at runtime with

And if someone wants that, if we make the interface modular and with 
a published interface, they can write one and submit it for a future 
release... (grin)

I realize the last couple of days we've brought forward a lot of neat 
stuff and then decided it's best NOT to do it, but sometimes the best 
thing you can do to make a project work is define what it's NOT, so 
you can focus on what it is. And put everything else down in the TODO 
for a future generation to wonder about.

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

And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar
and say 'Man, what are you doing here?'"