[Mailman-Developers] mailman and voting

[Barry A. Warsaw]

Hi Marilyn,

>>>>> "MD" == Marilyn Davis <marilyn@deliberate.com> writes:

    MD> I am the developer of eVote/Clerk, which hooks onto a
    MD> maillist-server in the alias file and looks for commands in
    MD> the incoming mail that start with "eVote".  These are diverted
    MD> and parsed by eVote and allow any of the members to poll the
    MD> group and administer the poll.  It has other super-democratic
    MD> features, like you can change your vote if you change your
    MD> mind, you can see others' votes (if the poll is initialized as
    MD> "public"), you can democratically spend budgets.

Sounds cool!

    MD> I'm in a sudden panic because I've been running it with
    MD> majordomo and that's old stuff.  The Linux Journal wants to
    MD> run an article about eVote/Clerk but they want it to be
    MD> running with Mailman.

Yay :)
    
    MD> My deadline is in a few weeks.

Ouch.

    MD> Theoretically, it should be a simple thing to switch.  I don't
    MD> touch majordomo's code at all.  (I wouldn't mind touching
    MD> Mailman's because I love Python.)

Yay :)

    MD> I'm hoping that some Mailman expert(s) might be available to
    MD> help me.

    MD> Maybe it'll be easy.

It might be.  I actually can't get to your SF pages right now.  It
looks like SF is under maintenance.  Can you give us a run down of
what code you do have?  Is it already in Python?  Is it a standalone
thing, or does it have deeper ties with the MLM?  How do you see eVote
hooking into Mailman?

    MD> eVote/Clerk source code is at sourceforge.net, if anyone wants
    MD> to give it a shot.  The current state of the cvs tree is ready
    MD> for release, even though I have not done an official release
    MD> of it.

It sounds like a great cause, but I'm not sure how much direct help I
can provide.  I'm pretty swamped right now.  I don't know if there are
any others on this list that might be able to lend a hand.

OTOH, I /can/ give advice or help out if you get stuck on something.
Why not give it a shot and see how it goes?  If you have questions or
run into problems, post to this list and we'll try to help out.

-Barry