[Mailman-Users] sharing administrator passwords

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Glenn Sieb writes:

 > Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
 > >  > I do like your idea though of having one main account per person which will
 > >  > then give you allowed access to all the lists you own or moderate (and
 > >  > subscribe to).  Don't know how doable it is though...
 > >
 > > This is definitely coming in Mailman 3, since user management will be
 > > separated from individual lists.  The same mechanism can surely be
 > > adapted to admin account management.
 > >   
 > 
 > Hey Brad!
 > 
 > So I misread this?

Yes and no.  As Brad points out, I am not a core Mailman developer,
nor do I have any other particular creds that anybody should listen to
me.

Nonetheless, the problem that in Mailman 2.x users have a password per
list and either have to reset all to the same one or keep lists of
them is a long-standing issue acknowledged by Barry and I believe Mark
as a "misfeature" at best.  Barry has said that he wants Mailman 3 to
be much more friendly to external, centralized user management, partly
for this reason.  Better user management is also essential to improved
anti-spam filtering (specifically, the MTA needs to be able to callout
to Mailman to check if the sender is a list member).

For these reasons I'd be willing to bet money that the necessary
centralized accounting features will be in Mailman 3.

On the other hand, don't hold your breath.  The main reason that I
mentioned it is cautionary: Mailman 3 is a ways away.  These features
are not going to be available in a production release for many months
AFAICS, and may very well depend on admins installing a real DBMS such
as LDAP or MySQL to get the features.  In the long run I expect it
will be a "batteries included" approach, but early releases may not be
easy to set up for these purposes.