[Mailman-Developers] snews note and nntp configuration suggestion

[Bret Mogilefsky]

Hello.

I'm trying to set up Mailman 2.0b4 to gateway our secure newsgroups to a
mailing list per group.  The first thing I notice is that there's no
support for snews (NNTP over SSL), presumably because SSL is a whole
new can of worms.  The second thing I notice is that there's no way
way to specify the port that should be used on the news host.  The
third thing I notice is that the same news username/password are used
for all mailing lists.  Consider the following information/suggestions.

The first problem should be easy to solve using stunnel
(http://www.stunnel.org). I can set up a wrapper on the Mailman host
that forwards NNTP over SSL to the remote server.  Assuming I can
specify the port I'm using to forward, everything should work.  This
should probably be documented somewhere in case people are tempted to
complain about the lack of SSL support as I was about to.

Second problem, no port.  Well, open_newsgroup() in gate_news passes parameters to nntplib.NNTP() for the username and password; why not pass the port as well?  I set this up as NNTP_PORT in Defaults.py and overrode it in my mmcfg.py, then hacked open_newsgroup() to use it.  Simple enough, BUT...

Third problem, the same username/password are used for all gated lists.  This seems an oversight in my opinion.  Consider for example SourceForge, where there are thousands of lists associated with various projects, each under the administration of that project.  It's really not useful for the list admin to be able to specify the news host and group, but not the port, username, and password.  All of these parameters should be configurable per list.  Great, so I should add those fields to the mlist structure... 

But at this point I burst out in tears and hide my face in shame because I'm really unfamiliar with Python and I don't know anything about how the web interface is being generated and I'm afraid to do any more hacks than what I've already described without seriously mucking things up.  Can someone help?  Is it too late to get this change into 2.0?

Thanks for your patience,

Bret
mogul at playstation.sony.com