Developers of Sympa

[David Verdin <address@concealed>]

Hi Tim,

Tim Retout a écrit :

On Wed, 2009-04-29 at 15:46 +0200, David Verdin wrote:
  

One of the two-three main development tasks coming for Sympa is: "Make 
the installation process easier".
This includes resolving the CPAN problem, and also improve the wizard, 
which would probably imply that most of the Sympa configuration would be 
done and modified through the web interface.

Any thoughts / tips about these aims?
    

Why not turn sympa (or most of sympa) into a CPAN module?

That way, CPAN dependencies would be handled by CPAN itself, declared
using a META.yml file.  Various distributions already have packaging
tools to take care of CPAN modules, so it might encourage more or better
packages.  There is already a system in place for automated testing of
CPAN modules as well, so add a testsuite and you could get sympa checked
on many different operating systems and versions of Perl.
  

Frankly I'm not sure. As seducing as CPAN is, we often had trouble with its test, and have been confronted to errors that most of the time we didn't understand.
If Sympa can't install because of dependencies failure, it would not change a lot if the failure error is issued by CPAN or by Sympa itself.

Regarding web configuration: there'll still be a human-editable file,
right? :)  It's handy for distributors to be able to ship or
automatically modify the configuration.
  

Sure! :)
Actually, what we have in mind for now would be something like this:

- Some parameters will be stored on file only, for example the database coneection parameters
- All the other parameters will be able to have a value both in the config file and in the database. Among them, we will define priorities:
    * for some parameters, if there is a value in the database and in the config file, the file value will  be used,
    * for other parameters, the database value will be used

It will always be possible to push values from the config file to the database, whatever priority the parameters use (by using a sympa.pl option ?). This will be necessary when upgrading to a version with parameters in database from a version without it. This kind of option should be usefull to packagers.

Regards,

David

-- 
David Verdin
Comité réseau des universités