[Mailman-Developers] Discussion On Project Idea "Preset List Settings Templates" .

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Barry Warsaw writes:

 > It's likely that the permissions would only be enforced in
 > Postorius, although we can think about how the core would enforce
 > the permissions.

I don't insist on core enforcement, though I think it desirable.  I do
ask that this functionality not be called "permission" if core doesn't
enforce it.  (Details in earlier reply to Harshit.)

 > One other thing to think about is whether some styles will be
 > allowed or disallowed for various domains or mailing lists.

I think this would be very convenient, but could be handled purely as
visibility control (after all, you can reconstruct any style attribute
by attribute unless prohibited in mm_cfg.py, but that's instance-wide
anyway).  Eg, a dotted name would be used as a str.endswidth filter,
and the convention would be to name styles according to List-Id, with
multiple styles or versions being "subdomains" of List-Id.  The
domains example.net (season to taste) and distribution.list.org would
be special, corresponding to anonymous styles and the GNU Mailman
distribution, respectively.  So typical names of styles would be

    xemacs-beta.xemacs.org = style used for xemacs-beta at xemacs.org
    v2.honeypot.xemacs.org = rev 2 of style used for honeypot at xemacs.org
    spam-fierce.example.net = a style containing spam filter
        configuration, but the admin doesn't want the name to give
        away which lists use it
    anonymous.distribution.list.org = Mark's recommendation for
        anonymous list configuration
    announce.distribution.list.org = Mark's recommendation for
        anouncement list configuration

and typical filters would be

    .xemacs.org
    .example.net
    .distribution.list.org

with the default being empty.  Both style naming UI and available
style lists could suppress the filter, and the convention would make
it easy to copy a list's style.

The special treatment of example.net is pretty clearly
over-engineering, but the information leakage that motivates it
represents the only reason I can think of for worrying about
availability of styles.

Since endswidth would be used to filter, you wouldn't have to break at
dots, but I think that would be intuitive to users.

The whole scheme is probably over-engineered, but maybe somebody can
bend it into something that's not too horrible. :-)  The main
advantage to it is that each list would implicitly name its own
configuration.  You would only need to explicitly choose a name when
you want something more generally descriptive, but hopefully most
generic styles will be in the Mailman distribution.

 > I think at the very least, some segregation based on domain would
 > be useful.

I do agree with that.

Steve