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

[Richard Wackerbarth]

Terri,

For Systers, is it better to try to access Postorius through its REST API or by directly including it as a django app?

In particular, using Django 1.5 and the custom user module feature that it provides along with the scheme that I outlined earlier provides an easy path to developing and integrating features such as the essays into the user profile.
Basically, we share a common User model.  Someone can start by using the standard django.contrib model and ignore the Postorius specific parts.

I am willing to implement the pieces (I estimate needing only a day or two if I do a simple version), but I also think that it would be an appropriate task for one of the students.

Richard

On Apr 30, 2013, at 10:31 AM, Terri Oda <terri at zone12.com> wrote:
> 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
> 
>