[Mailman-Developers] Integrating Mailman with a single sign-onservice

Mark Sapiro msapiro at value.net
Mon Jul 17 19:27:40 CEST 2006


Alisdair Tullo wrote:
>
>Here at the University of Edinburgh we have a single sign-on service based 
>on Cosign ( http://www.umich.edu/~umweb/software/cosign/ ). I've selected 
>Mailman as the mailing list software for a project I'm working on, and I'd 
>like to integrate it with Cosign if possible.
>
>I have a few questions about Mailman, if someone familiar with the code 
>can answer them I'd be very grateful.
>
>1. Is there a top-level design document for Mailman?


No. There is a description of message flow through Mailman in comments
at the beginning of Mailman/Queue/IncomingRunner.py, but that's about
it.


>2. Cosign gives a username in REMOTE_USER in each HTTP request. My intent 
>is to get users to sign up by entering this username and an email address, 
>then the web interface for Mailman would take the value of REMOTE_USER and 
>map it to the email address. Which area of the source should I be looking 
>at?


The Mailman web interface is entirely (with the exception of public
archives which link directly to static html pages) supported by a set
of CGI modules. These are accessed via wrappers, but the actual work
is done in the various python modules in Mailman/Cgi/. These modules,
with the exception of Auth.py which generates the Admin/Moderator
login page, have a one to one correspondence with the URIs that access
them. E.g. http://www.example.com/mailman/admin/... is processed by
admin.py and so forth.


>3. Would someone familiar with the Mailman web interface be willing to 
>help further and answer more detailed questions as I progress?


You can post your questions to this list, and I and others will do our
best to answer.

-- 
Mark Sapiro <msapiro at value.net>       The highway is for gamblers,
San Francisco Bay Area, California    better use your sense - B. Dylan



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