Developers of Sympa

[David Verdin <address@concealed>]

Hi Tim!

Tim Retout a écrit :
> Hi all,
>
> I am having trouble maintaining patches against the web interface,
> mainly because of its size (16000 lines).  For instance, today I am
> adding a new authentication system for a customer, and it is difficult
> to tell immediately whether my changes need to be made only in one
> place.  Is there any interest in refactoring the web interface,
Sure! If your customer need features, it is likely that other people 
will need it too.
If you can improve the web interface, we would love to read your proposals.
>  or using
> a web framework such as Catalyst?
>   
Not sure about it. We feel the code behind the web interface is going 
quite well. We plan to add custom actions and code hooks that would 
enable customization in the Sympa code without having to patch the 
application.
> I have also been seeing performance problems - when running with 1000
> lists or so, the 'List of Lists' pages can be very slow to load.  I
> believe this is because all the list configuration is on separate
> directories on the filesystem, so a lot of parsing and object creation
> must occur each time.  Is there any interest in moving the list
> configuration into the database?
>   
Yes !
Actually, we want all the config files (server, virtual host and lists) 
to be transferred into database. This is a tricky modification, because 
it implies a full edition and consultation of the config through the web 
interface (including parameters that were never used in the interface). 
We should also be able to see previous versions of a list config (to 
understand what an owner did, for example), and we still don't know if 
we should keep plain config files on the filesystem or not, and how 
these files should be synchronized with the database.
We also plan to port all the spools into database, as was done with the 
spool outgoing in Sympa 6.0. This should be easy as the basics are 
implemented already, but that would also imply a management through the 
web interface.
> These may well be questions for after sympa 6, but I want to give
> everyone some notice before I go and start writing features that may
> never get merged! :)
>   
Good idea. I guess other people on this list must have their own idea of 
what would be good to do.
On such "big" topics as configs in database, we should agree with how it 
should be implemented and what changes to the architecture it would imply.
This page in the Sympa web site is sed to write down ideas about where 
Sympa should go: https://www.sympa.org/dev/project_direction
Anybody from the sympa-dev mailing list can modify this page, so feel 
free to read it and add your own thoughts.

Regards,

David

P.S. : The sympa authors will globally not have a lot of time on their 
hands until next monday, due to the 10 yards todo list each of us has on 
his desk. So we probably won' be too verbose on the lists until then. 
That doesn't mean we'll forget you! ;)

--
David Verdin
Comité réseau des universités