Developers of Sympa

["Kevin McCann" <address@concealed>]

What do the developers of Sympa think about the idea of extending MySQL
usage to include much more? I think it would be a very good thing to have
list config, membership info and message archive info in a database. And
even the incoming mail queue and transaction logs.

I firmly believe that the internet community needs a mailing list manager
(MLM ) that has a complete SQL backend. There is one such MLM, Lyris, but it
is prohibitively expensive and not open source. But it performs very well
and it is easy to build frontend applications on top of it (insteading of
using their web interface).

An open SQL-based MLM would support the development of diverse and useful
frontend tools. PHP-based content management systems (PHP-Nuke, Postnuke,
Xaraya, etc.) could tie a mailing list to a web community that has other
features such as calendar, document uploads, and much more.

Sympa developers have seen the need and the wisdom of supporting MySQL
member tables. Why not go all the way? Backwards compatibility would be an
issue, and not all Sympa users would want to have to run MySQL, so I propose
a Sympa4MySQL offshoot.

Any interest?

I do intend to see this type of activity happen and will do whatever it
takes. But it would be nice to have the participation of people who have MLM
expertise and it would save time and money to build on an existing MLM
instead of starting from scratch. If you're interested in a SQL-based MLM,
please let me know.

- Kevin