Re: Development Plan

Hello everyone,

first I want to say we need to stop dreaming. We are at the very beginning 
and have to get something working first, before addressing further abstract 
issues. We have not even recognized the pattern, so how can we talk about 
abstraction. Once we have *an* implementation it will be easier.

At 08:59 AM 12/5/2001 +0100, Joachim Werner wrote:
>Are we going to store the list memberships with the members or with the
>lists? (What are plans for Mailman 2/3?)

I think that is easy. Always, Members are going to be in Mailing Lists. 
They might not be full members, but at least a representation of them with 
some additional data. Also, I do not want to require having a central 
repository.
Thinking about it, all this management stuff should be defined in a 
separate application or product. I did that before with another site and it 
works well.
For example If a user is added to a User Folder, he is automatically signed 
up for a mailing list. This has nothing to do with ZMailman, since it is 
logic that belongs to the User Folder.

>Or will there be a linking table (which would be the SQL way of doing it)?

You can think of it this way if you like. Linking + extra data.

>Or will we have an API that
>exposes methods like list.getAllMembers() to MailMan and leave the
>implementation issues to the list and member storage modules?

Nope, because these modules also contain logic.

***START IMPORTANT ***

To everyone:
At the moment we are far away from the full data storage abstraction. Also, 
I do not want to think about a comprehensive membership-user handling. We 
do not even have the screens or any of the basic data structures ported, 
not even to mention the archives. We have plenty of issues *now*. Use your 
time and brain power solving *current* problems, instead of putting hours 
and hours in writing E-mails on how the ideal version could look like (I 
could write an entire article on that). These hours could be used to 
generate code.

***END IMPORTANT ***


Please, everyone, lets get some alpha code first (by then it is January) 
and then Barry and I (and whoever may want to join) will get together and 
try to propose some more final abstract design (for Mailman 3.0).

Regards,
Stephan

--
Stephan Richter
CBU - Physics and Chemistry Student
Web2k - Web Design/Development & Technical Project Management