Developers of Sympa

[Olivier Salaün <address@concealed>]

Sorry for participating so late to this thread :

Mark K a écrit :
> On Wed, 16 Jan 2008 16:10:27 -0500
> Joe Vieira <address@concealed> wrote
> > I work at a university (Clark University), and we are looking to implement 
> > Sympa with an LDAP backend.  one of the things we are looking for is the 
> > ability for our mailing list software to be able to update our ldap groups.  
> > it looks like there are some development documents pertaining to this in your 
> > dev section..(exporting_groups_in_ldap)  i am curious who is working on this 
> > project, what state it is in, and if i can help contribute to it to make it 
> > happen quickly and well.  I'm quite good at perl and know a lot about LDAP 
> > structures and design
> That's interesting since I would think it more common to do the opposite 
> (feed sympa from LDAP).  Not to pry, but why do you want sympa driving LDAP?  
> What else will you use those LDAP groups for?
>   

First of all, I'd like to refer to the development document Joe referred 
to : https://www.sympa.org/dev/exporting_groups_in_ldap
That's a new LDAP feature that was asked by some Sympa users and it 
probably makes sense for others.

The idea is that SOAP is a good way to allow a third-party application 
to interact with Sympa, but it requires significant changes to softwares 
that need to consume Sympa data and therefore might not be 
feasible/scalable. For such situations we need to find another API for a 
third-party software to consume data produced/gathered by Sympa : LDAP 
is a good candidate technology because it is widely implemented for 
application that consume groups definition. Group definition/management 
is what Sympa does (besides sending emails to these groups) and that's 
why third-party softwares might want to consume the data Sympa produces. 
We've described a feature that meets these needs in the document above.

We did not start the coding yet for the following reasons :

  1. we were waiting for further users to express the same feature
     requirement
  2. we wanted to have feedback on the design we have produced in this
     document (especially concerning the LDAP schema that should be
     adopted for the Sympa groups branch)
  3. we thought that somebody else could write the code

Therefore, Joe you're more than welcome.
Please feel free to criticize the  development document. If you are 
willing to participate to the coding, we can provide further details to 
define the code design and save you some time.