[Mailman-Developers] A bit of perspective ....

[Chuq Von Rospach]

On Jan 31, 2004, at 10:53 AM, Jeff Warnica wrote:

>
> I feel bad about jumping in to this discussion, and not necessaraly 
> being
> prepared to offer any real help, but anyway.
>
> LDAP may be a better data[base|sink] for configuration data then SQL.

actually, Jeff has a point. I was muttering to myself about this last 
night.

Mailman <-> LDAP as an interface means that anything that can generate 
an LDAP interface can talk to it. so perhaps the best thing to do is 
come up with an LDAP interface, define how the LDAP data should look, 
and then create a set of MySQL schemas that'll support that. I know 
barry's wanted to avoid requiring too many "things" to be installed to 
use Mailman, but when someone chooses to move to MySQL, I don't think 
it's unfair to assume they have or can install LDAP also.

And that would allow someone to use some other LDAP backing store more 
easily, since we're hiding the interface in a fairly standard setup. 
And with MySQL as the proof of concept, having somenoe add support for 
Postgres SQL, Oracle, DB files or something else would be a lot easier.

That'd also make life really rather nice for larger operations, because 
it's not far from that to splitting off the web piece from the delivery 
piece from the data store piece, allowing it to exist in organizations 
where services are cloistered from each other.

I like the idea. It's not much more work (if it's more work at all), 
and much more flexible, and creates an interface others can connect to 
as well, not a single vendor solution. I'll buy in...