Developers of Sympa

[Olivier Salaün <address@concealed>]

Hi Mark,

Mark K a écrit :
> I am setting up an installation of sympa inside of my company.  I am
> very pleased with sympa.  My first suggestion is to flesh out the SOAP
> interface more.  I'm sure this is on the agenda and I am willing to try
> to help out some, too.
>
>   
You're welcome to contribute of course.
> The main issue I am at now is about topics.  I am integrating sympa
> into an internal sourceforge instance we have.  
What sourceforge software are you using?
> We had previously
> been using mailman and I am trying to get sympa more tightly
> integrated into our main sourceforge interface than mailman was.
> SOAP is helping.  I am planning on using SOAP to list the mailing
> lists associated with a sourceforge project by making a topic for
> each project that creates mailing lists.  However, there is no
> interface whatsoever that I see in wwsympa, sympa, or SOAP to edit
> topics.  It seems one has to just edit etc/topics.conf manually. 
>
>   
That's an interesting feature to add. Currently topics.conf is only 
edited manually. I understand that if you create a topic for each 
sourceforge project, then you might need to update topics.conf at the 
same time. This rises 2 concerns : 1) you need remote functions (via 
SOAP) to update topics.conf 2) we need to define what privilege is 
required to edit topics.conf ; listmaster privilege ? a new 
authorization scenario ?

On the other hand why do you need to update topics.conf whenever a new 
project is created? Can't you just define high level topics in 
topics.conf, each project being a subcategory. Example: topic 
biocomputing would be defined in topics.conf, but 
biocomputing/my_software would only be defined in the list configuration 
file.

One feature you are probably missing but that you did not mention is a 
way to search all lists that belong to a given topic. This would require 
that Sympa either accepts an additional 'topic' parameter to the 'lists' 
SOAP function OR that the listType (returned by complexLists) is 
extended to provide the topics the lists belong to. With the later 
solution, you'd have to filter the lists in the sourceforge code.
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