[Mailman-Developers] Priority/status of moderated-edit and external user DB

[Jeff Waugh]

<quote who="Barry Warsaw">

> While the 2.1 approach is a step in the right direction (I have an
> experimental BerkeleyDB-based backend checked into the cvs head), there
> are a few problems with it:
> 
> - It is a pretty inefficient interface for some tasks, most notably the
> admin membership management u/i.  To build this u/i it has to load the
> entire user database into memory, even to display just a chunk of 30
> addresses.

I sort of suspected this when I first started hacking on it, but wanted to
get my hands dirty before saying anything about it. Would you want backends
to provide iterators? I guess it's a moot point considering what you say
next:

> - The design is still list-centric.  While I believe you could implement
> a backend that unifies the user database (e.g. barry at zope.com on list1
> has the same user profile as barry at zope.com on list2), I want to make
> this much more evident in the interface designs.  I want to invert the
> focus of Mailman from being list-centric to being user-centric.

*yes!* :-) That would provide so many plusses both for users and the code.
It would be a really good change, one I've been thinking about here and
there whilst doing the LDAP backend. It would definitely make integration
with different backends easier.

One thing I'm working on at the moment is list abstraction, so you can store
all of the list information in different formats (I'm primarily interested
in LDAP at the moment. With a few changes, there is the potential for
dynamic membership too (ie. "the members of this list are found via this
LDAP query").

I can't do all of this within the scope of my current contract, so if
anyone's interested in LDAP integration, seriously scalable backends, or
paying someone to help with the changes Barry describes above, please get in
touch. :-)

> I wonder if we can start talking about how to get the community to take
> over more of the maintenance of the 2.1 branch so that I can start
> concentrating on the 3.0 work?  Trying to do both in my spare time is
> difficult.

That's possibly a good entry point for me, though I'm not too familiar with
the rest of the codebase (beyond lists/members, backends, etc). I'm also
pretty swamped with GNOME stuff too. But we'll see. :-)

Thanks,

- Jeff

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linux.conf.au 2004: Adelaide, Australia         http://lca2004.linux.org.au/
 
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