Developers of Sympa

[David Verdin <address@concealed>]

Le 08/03/13 10:51, IKEDA Soji a écrit :

On Tue, 05 Mar 2013 17:34:28 +0100
David Verdin <address@concealed> wrote:

Dear all,

With the upcoming install of Sympa 6.2 on our production server (next 
week), the subsequent beta phase and the load of mails we received from 
contributors / users / funders, I feel it is time to start putting 
together our thoughts about Sympa for the next couple of years.


    Development plans


Here are our plans of development. These are RENATER project, but you 
may have your own that can certainly find their place in the roadmap:


        Features

  * Sympa in SaaS mode. We want to allow full virtual hosting of a Sympa
    service. That means a lot of evolutions for scalability concerns and
    new robot deployment. It will also require to make the largest part
    of Sympa functionnalities accessible through the web and / or web
    services (REST, SOAP). This is our next big step for Sympa 6.3.

Though I can't clearly grasp what "SaaS" means...,

Software as a service: We want to ease deplyment of new virtual hosts within a single Sympa instance, granting full control of the virtual host to its listamster throught the web interface.

 anyway, I believe
Sympa should be more modular.

I think we all agree on this! :)

For example, Mailman style "message pipeline" into which arbitrary
handlers to process or modify messages can be easily added.

Yes; I think that's the spirit of the "plugin" thing, but it is certainly not the only way to achieve it.

About terminology: I love "robot" or "bot", but as Guillaume pointed
out, the word tend to refer to the active agents such as Web spiders.
# As Sympa "robot" is passive agent having (in general) multiple
# virtual hosts for e-mail, Web and so on, it is not virtual host
# itself.
Anything more better might be.

What about "service"? The Sympa software is the engine allowing to operate several list services.

  * RFC 6729 <http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6729> implementation. This
    RFC allows to add "Received by" headers with richer information,
    such as "kept for moderation". This will greatly improve tracability
    of message in mailing lists.

Sounds good.

Yes, and probably easy to implement. Étienne would be interested in developping it.

  * RFC 5983 <http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5983> implementation. This
    RFC deals with i18n addresses and mailing lists. I think Sympa
    should implement it. I wonder whether Soji would have any advice
    about this implementation, which look tricky...

Very interesting!  I'll investigate RFC 6783 (successor of 5983) and
relating RFCs.

Great!
I thought you would be interested in this problematic. I didn't know the RFC had been replaced.

  * Potentially: changing our configuration file formalism to switch to
    something more common, such as YAML <http://www.yaml.org>. We could
    unify our configuration files and base them on CPAN modules instead
    of our current home made parsers.

I agree a Babel on Sympa config formats should be solved.
I prefer to human-readable and human-writable format such as YAML.

Same for me. YAML could be the way to go, then... there is a CPAN module for this... Marc  will certainly appreciate! ;)

BTW I'm wondering structured file formats are really needed.
Even simple "key = value" format may be able to provide conditional
settings (such as use_XXX or XXX_feature in current Sympa config).

Well, having structured data allows structured information. for example, I implemented automatic lists throught the web interface and had to do a very ugly formalism due to the lack of depth allowed by current parsing possibilities. Have a look at this: https://www.sympa.org/manual/list-families#configuration

A shame, isn't it?

This is what we really want to implement in the 6.3. Feel free to add 
the features you think should be added to this version. For example, we 
spoke about CSS 3 a while ago. It woul be great. Once we agree on 
development plans, we'll add a roadmap to the Sympa web site, with a 
section for Sympa 6.3 and another for releases after.

I'll reply to reminder of your mail in other days.

Thanks Soji, looking forward to read from you!

I wondered whether you would accept, all of you, to make a little visio in the end of next week? This could speed up discussion.

We have this Seevogh thing that allows visio to anybody accepting to run a Java VM on his computer.
I set up a foodle to try and find time slots during which we could discuss: https://groupes.renater.fr/reunion/foodle/Sympa-developpers-meeting-5139c

Due to the time difference between France and Japan, All the time slots are in the morning, to have better chances to discuss with Soji.

Regards,

David

<<snip>>

Best regards,

--

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David Verdin GIP RENATER - Direction Technique Service applicatifs aux utilisateurs Tél : +33 2 23 23 69 71

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