[Mailman-Developers] MM feature request - spread out the pain

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

skip at pobox.com writes:

 >     Stephen> If Mailman can do it *better* than cron, that would be another
 >     Stephen> matter.  That point is arguable, but my personal preference
 >     Stephen> would be to provide a generic feature that both cron and other
 >     Stephen> possible schedulers could take advantage of.
 > 
 > In fact, it is quite easy to argue that with a programmatic interface and
 > access to cron my "spread out the pain" request is better implemented
 > there.

"There" being in Mailman itself?  Or in cron?  (It's not obvious to me
whether Mailman could do this better internally or not; of course I'd
try to do it in cron before looking for a feature in Mailman, but
Jack's mileage would vary, I'm sure. :-)

 > The monthly mailing becomes a daily mailing which only sends
 > reminder notices to a fraction of the users.

Indeed, or weekly, or even 4x daily, and providing that kind of
flexibility of timing is something that cron has a lot of existing
support for.  OTOH, somebody still has to write the code to manage the
partial lists.  However, that code might be useful for other purposes
(eg, if a user who refers to the member list page often wants it split
into 4 equal-sized pages rather than 27 pages of wildly varying size).
(The above is what I mean by "generic features", and an example of how
they might be applied.)