The mailing list for listmasters using Sympa

[Felix Schäfer <address@concealed>]

Hello list,

I'm trying to set up a sympa robot linked to a redmine installation geared at 
users from german higher education, and I must say apart from the perl 
dependency hell (installing sympa just reminded me how much I dislike 
administering perl apps </rant>), I like it very much and configuration has 
been smooth until now. I do have a few questions though, and I'll start with 
the "should be obvious but can't find it" type.

First of all, is there a way to disable topics once and for all? My use-case 
is that redmine has no concept of topics (the projects are organized in a 
tree, so maybe I could use the first 2 levels as topics, but that's for 
later), I create all lists in a family, and I think if I didn't specify a 
topic in the config for the list, it would default to arts. So I either need 
to completely disable topics, or just have all created by the family 
definition dropped in "topicless" and hide every other from the users.

Next are shared_docs, nice touch, but I don't need it, that would create 
fragmentation with some redmine stuff. Again, can I completely disable it? 
One adjacent question though: where do files hosted as part of the urlize 
delivery method end up, and what access rights do they have? Do they end up 
in the shared_docs, or is it something else still?

Moving on to LDAP users: users don't have the possibility to register 
multiple addresses in the LDAP tree for now, but this is planned. Will sympa 
merge many existing sympa accounts to one when the users re-login to sympa 
after having added the extra addresses in LDAP? Will it work with part 
automatically generated accounts (pulled in from MySQL) and part sympa-only 
accounts? One additional thing I noted regarding the LDAP integration: it 
seems LDAP users can "change" their password against sympa, which would 
potentially lead to 2 passwords: one in LDAP and one in sympa. Is it possible 
to completely disable the user preferences or parts of it for LDAP users? Is 
it possible to pull in more (or specifically the name) than the mail address 
from MySQL, or at least from LDAP when the user logs in?

Last question for today with regard to families: can I conditionally allow 
only certain options in list configuration parameters? For example, I'd like 
to allow list owners a different set of options for subscribe depending on 
whether the list's visibility is conceal or noconceal. I fear I might need to 
create 2 families for that, but maybe one of you has a better option 
available :-)

Ok, so that's it (for today ;-) ), thanks in advance for answers to any part.

Felix

P.S.: and be sure to include me in the list of recipients as I am not a 
member of the list, thank you.