[Mailman-Developers] Mailman 3 configuration questions and feedback

[Florian Fuchs]

Hi Jeff,

On 05/22/2012 07:49 PM, Jeff Marshall wrote:
> Hey everybody.  I've been playing with 3.0.0b1 and Postorius.  I have
> some questions as well as some initial feedback.  I am assuming many
> of these are known issues or works-in-progress so I apologize ahead of
> time.
>
> * How do I add another person as an administrator to either a single
> list or to my full mailman installation?  I don't see this in either
> Postorius or the command line tools.

As far as Postorius is concerned, this is indeed work in progress.
At the moment you can add new superusers (for the full Postorius 
installation) via the command line from the dev_setup directory:

$ python manage.py createsuperuser

> * The BrowserID system on Postorius logs me out all the time, even
> after just a few page views.  I'm constantly having to hit the sign-in
> button again.  If I am trying to perform an administrative function I
> have to do it very quickly after signing in or else I'm logged out
> again.  (Mac OS X, Chrome).

My first guess was that it's a problem with browser privacy settings. So 
I tried to reproduce the problem with different cookie-settings - 
session-only, no 3rd party cookies, all cookies allowed. Still 
everything worked fine. I guess you do allow at least session-based 
cookies (otherwise you wouldn't have been able to log in in the first 
place).

Is it possible that you got thrown out after you got an error? If so, 
could you post the exception type displayed in the dump?

Does that happen only with browserid or also when you're logged-in with 
the superuser account created on syncdb??

> * The Held Messages page on Postorius only shows me the subject line
> of the messages.  It seems like the body of the message will also be
> important for reviewing the held message.

+1 ...only I think the msg body currently isn't exposed by the MM API 
(@Barry, can you confirm that?), in which case we would need two bug 
reports: One for mailman (expose body of held messages) and one for 
Postorius (show held msg body).

> * I get an error dump whenever I accept a held message on Postorius.
> The message goes through, though.
>
>      Exception Type: AttributeError
>      Exception Value:
>      'module' object has no attribute 'successful'
>      Exception Location:
> /home/marshman/mailman/postorius/src/postorius/views.py in
> accept_held_message, line 405

This is a bug. Feel free to file a bug report on LP. Otherwise I will... ;-)

> * Postorius doesn't seem to have confirmation messages after changing
> a setting or adding a subscriber.  It leaves me uncertain whether my
> change or subscriber addition went through.

+1 for confirmation messages on settings changes etc.

But you should see a confirmation message after 
subscribing/unsubscribing (displayed just below the page header).

> * Postorius could use a page showing the list members.

+1

> * Is there a plan for exposing some list traffic stats on the Mailman
> API and on Postorius?  It would be handy to see # of messages received
> today, etc, especially at this stage when I'm trying to figure out
> what is working or not.

Like Barry said: Luckily, there's a GSOC student working on metrics.

> * It might be handy in the Postorius docs to mention how to run a
> Django server on a public url; I hadn't used Django before so I was
> spinning my wheels for a bit until I dug this up:
>
>      $ python manage.py runserver 0.0.0.0:8000

You should use the django dev server only for testing.
Writing a tutorial on how to run Postorius using Apache has been on my 
todo list for a while. There are a number of tutorials out there on 
Django/Apache though... (But I should still finally write that thing... ;-)

> I'm happy to file tickets on Launchpad but I didn't want to do so
> until I understood what is already in progress.

There's no reason why you shouldn't. And thanks a lot for your feedback!

Florian