The mailing list for listmasters using Sympa

[Steven Peterson <address@concealed>]

We need to expand the capabilities of sympasoap so that we can get additional
information about each list, including the owner, the moderators, the
subscriber count, and other items in the list config.  We would like to make
the changes so that our work can be used by the rest of the sympa community, 
so
we ask for input from other sympasoap users about which approach would be most
backward compatible.

1) We could expand the existing 'ListType' record type to include the
additional list config fields, then update complexLists service to return the
more extensive ListType records in the returned array of list info.  This
approach keeps the interface simple, but may break existing clients, as some
clients may barf when they encounter the new properties in the new ListType
record.

2) We could create an entirely new ExtendedListType record that has all the
list config fields in it, then add a new extendedLists service that extends 
the
functionality of complexLists but returns the ExtendedListType.  This approach
seems sloppy but may also be the best way to maintain backward compatibility.

It is too bad that web services are so hard to extend -- is there a backward
compatible way?