[Mailman-Developers] Scripts' consistency

[Nadim Shaikli]

A minor (non-critical) suggestion.  It would be ideal if all the
scripts had similar input/command-line formats and were grouped
per type.  For instance

 add_members
 clone_member
 find_member
 list_members
 remove_members
 sync_members

all deal with members so maybe they should be named members_* so
you'd end-up with

 members_add
 members_clone
 members_find
 members_list
 members_remove
 members_sync

Currently the command-line of the above consists of,

add_members [options] listname
  -r in_file (regular)
  -d in_file (digest)
remove_members [options] [listname] [addr1 ...]
  -f in_file

Here it would be ideal if the options were the same esp on the
command-line (ie. offer addr1, etc to add_members).  The usage
of brackets is also a bit misleading as it denotes all optionals
(not true in 'remove_members' and 'newlist', among others).  I'd
suggest,

members_add [options] listname [addr1 ...]
  -i in_file (regular)
  -d in_file (digest)
members_remove [options] listname [addr1 ...]
  -i in_file

To ease life for the list administrators, I would humbly suggest
to change the following script names from,

 check_db
 dumpdb

 config_list
 list_admins
 list_lists
 list_owners
 newlist
 rmlist

be replaced with,

 db_check
 db_dump

 list_config
 list_admins
 list_lists
 list_owners
 list_new
 list_remove

this would also match the suggested 'members' scripts above.

Finally, all the other scripts that relate to mailman administration
could be changed from,

 genaliases
 inject
 transcheck
 unshunt
 update
 version
 withlist

 mailmanctl

to

 admin_genaliases
 admin_inject
 admin_trans_check
 admin_unshunt
 admin_update
 admin_version
 admin_withlist

 mailman_ctl  (or maybe ctl_mailman)

where other control/qrunner/etc scripts could be bunched into the 
mailman_* group.

Just a suggestion.  Its rather hard to make one's way through all the
scripts and to know what they all do and what format they all require.
Consistency and grouping would be nice.

NOTE: various other .py* scripts within same dir were skipped.

Sorry for the noise.

Regards,

 - Nadim


__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software
http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com