The mailing list for listmasters using Sympa

[Peter Farmer<address@concealed>]

Hi,

I need some guiudance on what is the best way to deal with a std sympa 
database
field that is too small for my usage patterns ?

I am using the subscriber topics feature heavily and for some particular 
lists,
a subscriber may need to be registered for many or all of the 250+ 
(predefined)
topics . The topics_subscriber field in the subscriber table is too small to
cope with this much text  (only 200 chars whereas I _may_ need up to 3000
chars). I can change the database structure - say by converting to
topics_subscriber to a TEXT field and this works ok ( other than needing to
modify the wwsympa interface to present user records in a way that copes with
the much larger potential field size). I also need to turn off (via
update_db_field_types) the automatic database structure update that sympa does
on restarts - it detects the changes made to the default structure and 
rebuilds
the db. 

Is this the correct/best way to deal with this issue ?. Is there anything else
I need to do to preserve my changes ?. Should/Can I alter what sympa considers
the 'correct' database structure so it doesnt trigger database structure
changes at restart without having to turn off automatic database structure
updates altogether ( with update_db_field_types)


Thanks in advance for any input 

Peter Farmer