[Mailman-Developers] Help programming MemberAdaptor...

[Martin Whinnery <martin.whinnery@sbc.ac.uk>]

On Wed, 30 Oct 2002, Greg Ward wrote:

> > What I'd really like to do is have lists EITHER populate in the normal
> > file way OR populated from LDAP. I was thinking I might use an address
> > like
> 
> Err, define "populate".  Is this a one-time thing?  Or do you want the
> list membership to always come from an LDAP lookup?
> 

The latter. I help run a large educational campus, and we hold all
accounts and groups in LDAP. These groups change membership over time, and
I want to associate mailing lists with some of them. What I don't need is
the headache of remembering to keep the memberships in sync.

> If the former, I would just write a script that does the LDAP query and
> sets the list population from it.  Use bin/add_members as an example.
> 

If we absolutely must. It's what we do with DNS and DHCP. But I'd rather
not. Just more code to maintain.

> If the latter, why use Mailman at all?  Why not just use an MTA that can
> lookup aliases using LDAP, and then send mail to that alias?  I'm pretty
> sure both Exim and postfix can do that.
> 

'Cos mailman does the [approve|reject|defer|discard] thing. And
archives. And it deals with 'real' mailing lists (which we would die
rather than lose).

Martin Whinnery
*Assistant* Network Manager
South Birmingham College

'Just the assistant'