[Mailman-Developers] About authentication (was Re: Architecture for extra profile info)

[Terri Oda]

On 13-04-29 11:28 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
> Actually, there aren't any students explicitly discussing extra profile
> information in their proposals.  They talk airily about "extended REST
> API" or similarly generic terms.  None talk about storage or
> representation of profile information.  (OK, it was 3am, my memory is
> fallible.  I don't remember any, though.)
>

Oh!  I think I understand some of the confusion now.  I thought I'd said 
at the beginning why I was starting this thread at all, which is 
primarily because Systers has a student project that needs extra profile 
info.  There are also a collection of students with minor features that 
would use the data store that they've used to pad out projects that 
might otherwise be too short (For example, see some of the ideas Peter 
Markou mentioned in his recent post).  But now that you mention it, I've 
been talking to a lot of folk on IRC and they often don't tell me if 
they're applying with Mailman or Systers, so maybe there's more of them 
with Systers than with Mailman?


For those not familiar, Systers runs a heavily modified version of 
Mailman 2.1.  They'd like to switch to Mailman 3 shortly after we 
release Mailman Suite (whenever that's going to be), but they've got a 
few features that they'll need to either have integrated to core Mailman 
or maintained as branches.  This year, they've got a project set up to 
port one of them to Mailman 3/Postorius as part of preparing them for that.

The specific feature they're hoping to add this year stores essays that 
people write when they subscribe.  It's currently done with a database 
grafted on to Mailman 2.1 that was being used for another extended 
feature, but obviously if we're going to mentor such a project for 
Mailman 3, we'd like to use something at least approximating a real data 
store design.   The problem is that the Systers mentors are mostly used 
to systers-mailman, based on 2.1, and I'm not sure anyone will have the 
Mailman 3.0 knowledge to guide a student through a halfway reasonable 
design, so I asked here in order to help them out so that their student 
could start on the essays (likely to be the easier part of her project) 
right at the beginning of the GSoC period.  If we can't come to a 
moderate consensus on that design, I should be telling the Systers folk 
that this project won't be able to run this year, but I honestly figured 
we'd have a simple design after a couple of posts... I wasn't counting 
on authentication blowing up to a huge argument, and I don't have time 
for it do so if we want to make a good decision about this specific project.

So yeah, totally cool to be thinking about the more advanced projects in 
general, but I started this thread due to a specific need for a "good 
enough approximation for this Mailman suite release" version of the 
extra data store, and I still need a consensus on that that's either 
implemented or simple enough for a student to do in the first week of 
GSoC.   I think we're pretty close to that point, but I'm not sure it's 
yet described in a way that we can hand it off safely to a student and 
get a REST API that actually meaningfully matches the discussion within 
a couple of days.  Probably we need an actual set of doctests for the 
student to work against next and then we'll be there.

Incidentally, I've been trying to get the students interested in this 
particular Systers project to come to this mailing list and join in the 
discussion, but it's become *very* intimidating to take part in this 
thread, which is the other reason I need folk to take a step back.

  Terri