[Mailman-Users] MySQL?

[Jonathan Knight]

On Fri, May 30, 2003 at 11:16:46AM -0400, Kevin McCann wrote:
> On Fri, 2003-05-30 at 10:30, Angel Gabriel wrote:
> > I remember reading somewhere that mailman can operate with a MySQL
> > backend? If that is so, they it should be possible to develop a diffrent
> > front end, to interface with users, add users to mailman etc etc.
> > 
> > Is there any truth to this??
> 
> If this was true I'd be doing a breakdance right about now.  ;-)


I chose mailman because it didn't have any complex database backends.  The
reason is because I run mailman as a mission critical service for Keele
University and so I want the least amount of software and technology to do
the job.  Each new piece of software has to be evaluated and tested, then
installed and checked and then a backup procedure worked out and also a
fault recover procedure.  Mailman as it stands is easy because there really
isn't that much beyond the software scripts and the data directories to it.
All I have is an "rdist" running to copy a working set of software to a
backup machine every few hours.  Should we get a failure the changeover is
very simple.

If you start adding MySQL into the equation then there's the mailman stuff
AND the MySQL stuff to set up for duplicate fault tollerant operation.

If mailman could be made to work concurrantly on several servers using a
distributed MySQL database then that would certainly be worth doing because
you get failover backups for free but I suspect that the architecture of
mailman is too ingrained to the "qrunner" concept to make that possible.



-- 
  ______    jonathan at cs.keele.ac.uk    Jonathan Knight,
    /                                  Department of Computer Science
   / _   __ Telephone: +44 1782 583437 University of Keele, Keele,
(_/ (_) / / Fax      : +44 1782 713082 Staffordshire.  ST5 5BG.  U.K.