The mailing list for listmasters using Sympa

["Rolf E. Sonneveld" <address@concealed>]

Hi, David,

On 06/24/2010 05:45 PM, David Verdin wrote:

address@concealed"> Hi,

I over-answer to myself, sorry: I should have added that we are working on a hook mechanism that will allow listmasters to add customized treatment to any operation performed in Sympa.
In your case, you would be able to execute, at the end of the subscribers synchronizing, a script updating your LDAP directory. But this is for a future version of Sympa.

Thanks for your answer.

address@concealed">Please take note that you must be very careful when implementing such a treatment and make sure that you don't create a loop in which Sympa would update a directory that it would also use as a datasource. This would be very dangerous for data consistency.

I'm not sure I understand why. What I'd expect from Sympa (or in general, any MLM) using LDAP as datasource is something like:

• upon a subscribe action by a user, add an LDAP entry for the user if it's not present, or modify it adding a subscription attribute + value
• upon a 'set mail/nomail' action, modify the LDAP entry to set the user to 'mail/nomail'
• upon a 'set digest/setnodigest' action, modify the LDAP entry to set the user to 'digest/nodigest'
• upon an unsubscribe action by the user, remove the list subscription attribute + value, or if this is the last list where the user is member of, remove the LDAP entry
• upon a new list creation: add the list to LDAP (a.o. adding a mail alias/address for the list), optionally defining the list as an LDAP dynamic group of adding an LDAP filter to the list LDAP entry, which defines the members of the group; the list LDAP entry can also have attributes indicating moderator, listmanager etc.
  
• upon a delete list: delete the list from LDAP
• etc. etc.

It seems currently Sympa can only use LDAP via some sort of synchronization mechanism. I'd suggest to switch to a real dynamic way of using LDAP, no synchronization from LDAP to other data sources. Just direct LDAP lookups and actions.

Regards,
/rolf

--

Rolf E. Sonneveld
Consultant

Sonnection B.V. - E-mail and Directory Services
Nieuwlandseweg 44
3824 XT Amersfoort
The Netherlands
E-mail: address@concealed
Phone: +31 (0) 33 480 3968
Mobile: +31 (0) 6543 70205

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