Developers of Sympa

[Olivier Salaun - CRU <address@concealed>]

Adam Bernstein wrote:

> I'm looking for information on the status of Sympa's development,
> either for the next major 3.x release or for 4.0.  I don't see
> anything on the Web site, including the CVS interface.  Am I 
> missing something?  You had a very welcome call for feature
> requests for 4.0 a while ago, and it would be helpful just to
> have those collected somewhere, but I don't even see that.  The 
> "In the Future" page is very general and hasn't been updated 
> recently.
>  
I know we did not communicate much on develpments essentially because we 
did not
have much time to do it and because we could not precisely evalute what 
new developments
could be done.

> I'd like to know where you are on a number of tasks, and I don't
> want to keep bothering you with questions.  But to give an idea,
> the topics include:
>   -Integrated polls via SOAP -- promised last fall...?
>   -Automatic bounce management (subscriber removal)
>   -Customizing mail content per subscriber
>   -Improved Web interface (maybe with Javascript & images?)
>   -Text digests
> And there's much more....
>  
I know there have been lots of feature request and I think that's what 
has made Sympa
such a powerfull tool : features ideas come from users needs.

Here is what should be integrated in Sympa :
   * automatic bounces management : Benoit Ortner has been working on 
it during his training period
   here and he's going to finish this work next week.
   * SOAP : we have a SOAP server not yet integrated within the main 
distribution. It would help us
   greatly if some site could install it and do some tests.... Anyhow 
we should integrate the SOAP server
   within the distrib. soon.
   * Internationalization : it has become a nightmare to translate 
Sympa because files are spread all over
   the place. Chia-liang has submitted a modified version of Sympa that 
uses a single version of templates
   using PO files for translations. I am currently working on 
validating this.
   * Web interface : we have received some web interface changes 
(including getting rid of the too many
   tables) ; we need to finish the internationalization changes before, 
we'll then only have to work on
   a single set of templates.
   * Single Sign On : we will integrate a SSO client in Sympa, mainly 
because we need this feature for
   most french universities.

I don't think we'll have time to develop much more features...but 
contributions are welcome :)

> We are continually customizing and adding features to our Sympa code, and we 
> may soon be doing a large project that would include a rough algorithm for 
> bouncing subscriber removal (which we have already designed).  I'd like to 
> know where Sympa development stands, to make the best use of our resources.
>  
We'll definitely have an automatic bounce management system at the end 
of this summer. This work in not finished yet so please tell us abou 
your design : we could grab some good ideas.

--
Olivier Salaun
Comite Reseau des Universites