The mailing list for listmasters using Sympa

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

Hello, David,

On 06/25/2010 11:14 AM, David Verdin wrote:

address@concealed"> Hi Rolf,

Le 24/06/2010 20:16, Rolf E. Sonneveld a écrit :

address@concealed"> 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.

Yes. Sympa extracts email addresses from LDAP to build lists. It can also extracts these addresses from flat files, remote flat files, other lists and RDBMS. this one way to get subscribed to a list. the other one is to simply manually subscribe to the list, by email or through the web interface.
After that, the subscriptions, whichever orgiin they have, are stored in the Sympa database.

Thanks for your explanation.

address@concealed">

address@concealed">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.

Actually, it looks like you want any data regarding subscriptions to be stored in an LDAP directory instead of the database. Am I right?
What we are working on is to export the lists as LDAP groups, but the base information would still be in the database. The point of making lists available through LDAP is to let other applications use the lists as a basis to build groups to use within their own framework. Keeping that in mind, we don't intend to export subscription options or the lists themselves.

Considering the number of informations stored in the database (subscriptions, admins, sessions, spools...) it is unlikely that we will switch the storage from RDBMS to LDAP.

It could make sense to allow storage of subscriptions only to an LDAP directory but this would require changes in very low layers of Sympa and in a large number of places in the code. I'm not sure that the result would be worth it.

Anyway, this is a complex and long work that we won't be able to do before a long time, though we would gladly accept contributions.  :-)

If I were a programmer I'd certainly would like to contribute code, but unfortunately I'm not a programmer.
Thanks,

/rolf