[Mailman-Developers] Re: Future of pipermail?

[Chuq Von Rospach]

At 5:33 PM -0500 11/21/00, Barry A. Warsaw wrote:

>I'll just note briefly that Greg is a long time Pythonista

excuse me if I quietly twich at the terminology (does anyone know 
where this -ista stuff came from? My first run-in iwth it was Guy 
Kawasaki and his "evangelistas", but was it used before that?


>I want to read and think more, but I've been interested in WebDAV as a
>technology for a while now.

I'm starting to see serious pushes (and I'll self-admit to be one 
here!) towards serious, hard-core integration of technologies. Which 
is a double-edged sword of the worst and best kind. I've talked to 
Barry about building ways to allow for site-wide authentication 
issues, for instance, and now we're seeing WebDAV (which I find 
interesting, and given it's going to be part of Apache 2.0, it's got 
to be considered heir presumptive in this technology psace now, over 
things like, oh, Zope. And I was looking over a couple of other 
things today (MetaDot to name one.. 
<http://www.metadot.com/metadot/index.pl?iid=1876>) and going "hmm. 
you know, that stuff's got potential, too...)

There's HUGE synergy potential here. We certainly shouldn't avoid 
those things, but the more we start tying into (and/or depending on) 
other technologies, the more we lock users into a single technology 
suite, the more we start depending on specific technology suites the 
more we lock uers into our view of how things work, and the less 
flexibility we give them in building their sites. And, to some 
degree, the less ability we have to adapt to future changes in the 
net universe ourselves.

None of which is a reason to not do these things -- but it's reason 
to be wary. We really need to understand how these things interact 
and what the side effects are, including things as basic as "does 
this mean it'll never run on Windows NT again?" or "did we just set 
it up so they have to run apache?"

I think there's a lot here we want to do (and need to do) but -- not 
for the sake of doing it.

WebDAV looks fascinating. WebDAV -- as mailman's default archiver -- 
looks to me to be overkill at a quick evaluation. Yes, it'll be in 
there by default for apache 2.0, once Apache 2.0 ships and is out for 
a while and everyone upgrades. that's, what, 2 years out before 50% 
of the sites are running apache 2.x? Easily. Until then, what do we 
do? And what about non-apache sites? what's this do to mailman across 
all supported platforms?

I dunno -- but there's a lot of complexity here we need to make sure 
we deal with in these issues. And to some degree, I think it's 
another excuse for me to pull out the "lots of separately tracked 
modules with API's" schtick, because we can build a Mailman API and a 
WebDAV plug-in for it(along with Mhonarc and Pipermail plug-ins) and 
over time, as WebDAV becomes endemic, switch the priority of 
development in its direction, without locking into it. In two years, 
there'll be other stuff beyond WebDAV, too, I'll bet.

I know, I know... it's all details. Details are boring (grin). but necessary...
-- 
Chuq Von Rospach - Plaidworks Consulting (mailto:chuqui@plaidworks.com)
Apple Mail List Gnome (mailto:chuq@apple.com)

The vet said it was behavioral, but I prefer to think of it as genetic.
It cuts down on the liability -- Get Fuzzy