[Mailman-Developers] Re: being flexible.

[J C Lawrence]

On Fri, 31 Oct 2003 10:21:20 +0100 
Simone Piunno <pioppo at ferrara.linux.it> wrote:
> Alle 01:51, venerdì 31 ottobre 2003, J C Lawrence ha scritto:

>>> A test installation (or a poor man's installation) will fetch
>>> messages from pop3 mailboxes...
 
>> Hell no.  Mailman is a conformant well behaved and very standard mail
>> system, not a hack on top of a kludge that deliberately flouts the
>> standards just because it wants to.

> Hehe, I knew you'd have screamed :) 

Aye, its a lot of fragile and unnecessary work that encourages a use of
mailman which I'd rather never occurred.

> Try to think it the other way: a test installation with pop3 is an
> hack on top of a solid conformant well behaved and very standard mail
> system.  

Right, but the information lost across the non-SMTP translation is
irretrievable and necessary.

> Skilled people can do it right now with Mailman 2.1: just configure
> fetchmail to act as an MTA and pipe messages to Mailman.  The only
> difference I proposed is that non-skilled people should be able to do
> this... 

I account this one of those areas where the people who know how to do
it, also have some hope of knowing better than to.

>> Why?  Even ignoring the abuse possibilities, what possible reason
>> could we have for that time and effort investment when those problems
>> are already far more competently and easily handled than we ever
>> could, and there are so many other, more rewarding and demanding
>> problems and features on the burner?

> We all know CGI is sub-optimal.  We're also planning to stop vending
> archives directly from disk, increasing the CGI load.  

True, however the processing delta can be kept quite small.

> mod_python or a web runner would perform better.

The problem there is that they are insufficiently portable.

> I feel the reverse-proxy configuration (similar to zope) would be the
> better choice.  

Why would it be better?  What are the disadvantages of those benefits?
What specifically useful or necessary function would it add which is not
being served today?  What interesting and valuable deployment cases
would it prevent or make more difficult?  Which would it open to the
product that are not current addressed?

Let's get a cost and value statement going.

-- 
J C Lawrence                
---------(*)                Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas. 
claw at kanga.nu               He lived as a devil, eh?		  
http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/  Evil is a name of a foeman, as I live.