[Mailman-Developers] PHP Wrappers?

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

>>>>> "Ian" == Ian Eiloart <iane at sussex.ac.uk> writes:

    Ian> No, you've evidently completely misunderstood me. All I do
    Ian> want is for Mailman to use *exactly* the same mechanisms for
    Ian> sender ACLs that it does for rosters. If that's LDAP, that's
    Ian> fine. If it's SQL, that's fine. If it's flat files, that's
    Ian> fine.

As Brad says, that's easier said than done.  As it happens, Mailman
does (by default) use exactly the same method---it's called a "Python
pickle".

But a Python pickle is an _object_ database.  LDAP is about
tree-structured databases, SQL about relational databases.  It's
non-trivial to put most of the stuff in Mailman into those formats.

The problem isn't really that pickles are Python-specific, that's what
Fred Brooks would call an "accidental" obstacle.  You're right, we
could, at a fairly predictable amount of effort, convert from a
Python-specific data store to a standard one accessible by a
well-defined protocol such as LDAP or SQL.  The problem is that the
data used by Mailman doesn't necessarily fit those models, and we
won't know how hard the conversion is (ie, what effects there will be
on various parts of Mailman) until we do it.  It's a good bet that it
will be harder than it looks.

Regards,



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