Re: : Mailman Help

On Fri, Aug 1, 2014 at 9:32 PM, Myles Braithwaite
<me-qIX3qoPyADtH8hdXm2+x1laTQe2KTcn/@public.gmane.org> wrote:
> Does anyone know how to setup mailman so that when someone subscribes
> to a discussion list they will also be subscribed to an announce list?
>
> Also does anyone have any strong feels on why a mailing list shouldn't
> have this feature?

Well, to be snide, if people wanted to subscribe to two lists, they'd
ask for both lists.

But seriously, yes, I see what you want here (and I appreciate that
it's fairly desirable), and, well, it's a feature that requires a
curious amount of additional design in order to capture the
configuration.

It's reasonably easy to say that the one-way alias (e.g. - "joining
DISCUSS implies joining ANNOUNCE but not the converse"; declaring it
so is not quite so easy.

It requires either a rule system (so you can have rules indicating the
relationships between mailing lists) or something like the SQL concept
of a VIEW where tables are virtualized.  (And it's not at all a
coincidence that in Postgres, the way that VIEWs are implemented are
using a subsystem called RULEs so that they can be seen as nearly the
same thing.  See Stonebraker's paper
<db.cs.berkeley.edu/papers/ERL-M90-36.pdf>)

Mailman is pretty "procedural" in its implementation; it didn't try to
be terribly sophisticated about this sort of thing, and, not to bash
the use of Mailman overly much even before we get it all completely up
and running, if we truly wanted something more sophisticated,
Mailman's not that.  For sophisticated, we probably should be looking
at sympa (http://sympa.org) or similar.  And I'm really not sure we
truly have such sophisticated needs.  Nay, I don't think I want to go
to something that complicated, at least not yet.
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