The mailing list for listmasters using Sympa

[Dallas Wisehaupt <address@concealed>]

As we get further into Sympa, I have found many things that I like. We
have started to see some potential for uses that we didn't think would
be possible.

One of those things is the ability to provide mail lists for each course
and section at the University. Through carefully crafted LDAP/SQL
includes we can get our lists of students as subscribers, Instructors
and TAs as owners, and even department secretaries as moderators.

Since we have completed the proof of concept, we are looking at how to
create and manage these lists in mass updates. I have been looking at
the documentation, and I'm trying to get a better grip on how we could
do this. I believe families are the correct way to go, but I was
wondering if anyone had examples of how they used them.

I think I see two ways to go about this. One is to generate the family
XML file and do the initial instantiation for all the lists. Then, if
courses are added or dropped, add them to the family XML file and call
the --add_list or --close_list funtions for those specific lists as
necessary. We would probably have different families for each term just
to make term boundry actions (create/delete) easier on us.

The other option would be to create an XML file per section/list and
manage them independantly. I think that this would have the same effect,
but would create more work (even though it would be automated) during
the term boundries.

I don't forsee at this point that list modifications would be made
through either of these interfaces. The only thing that would be altered
would be membership which is handled through the include files.

Does this sound like the correct use of these functions? Is there a
better way?

Thanks for any comments.

Dallas
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Dallas Wisehaupt                            Systems Administrator
address@concealed               The University of Scranton