[Mailman-Developers] Mailman 3: dlist integration

[Terri Oda]

I suspect the person to answer this is Barry, but I'm sending to the 
developers list just in case.

I'm working through getting dynamic sublists (dlists) integrated into 
Mailman 3 (probably targeting the 3.1 release) and I've got a question: 
where should the thread name be stored?  Does that go with the message?  
Does it need to go in a separate table with message+list as keys?

Some background:

Dynamic sublists is an Mailman 2.1 extension that systers uses so that 
mailing list subscribers can subscribe or unsubscribe to individual 
conversations on a mailing list.  It's sort of like a fancier, more 
automated version of topics, where users can start new conversations at 
will by sending to mailinglist+new at example.com. This is in contrast to 
topics, which need to be set up by the admin in advance.  It's a pretty 
neat feature and one they've been using for quite a long time, so it's 
well-tested and because "I wish I could unsubscribe from this stupid 
thread" is a pretty common requested feature, I'm hoping we can use 
dynamic sublists to replace topics in Mailman 3.

In a dlist-enabled list, every message is part of a thread, as 
determined by the posting address used 
(mailinglist+threadname at example.com or +new for a new thread whereupon 
we create a new name).  We need to somehow have the thread name passed 
around with the message, and I'm *guessing* that just putting that 
metadata in with message is the right choice, but I'm worried that 
message doesn't seem to have listinf stored so maybe the message is 
list-independent and could be sent to multiple lists and thus be on 
multiple threads at once.

(Incidentally, the other stuff we need to store is the user default 
preference for new threads, which can go in their preferences, and the 
user/list/thread preference for threads they've specifically subscribed 
or unsubscribed from, which will have to be a separate table.)

So, um, Barry... where would you prefer that I stick the thread metadata?

  Terri