COmanage Developers List

[Digant C Kasundra <>]

Forwarding Jon Robertson's responses found below....


----- Forwarded Message -----
From: "Jon Robertson" 
<>
Subject: Re: [comanage-dev] Sympa domestication?

> ----- "RL 'Bob' Morgan" 
> <>
>  wrote:
> 
>> We're chatting with the Sympa guys about some DKIM stuff, and wanted
>> to 
>> also challenge them regarding whatever comanage would like to have to
>>
>> better integrate/domesticate Sympa.  Do we have a clear idea of what
>> we'd 
>> like?

I'm afraid I don't have a good answer there.  The problem I had most was 
just trying to get up to speed on Sympa itself, generally speaking. 
Specifics below on the things I did and the difficulty level, but I'm 
not sure if there's that much (aside from the Apache issue) that's 
actually something that was a problem.

Integrating with Shibboleth was pretty simple and well-documented.  It 
just took finding a stanza and dropping it into an auth.conf file to 
install over the distributed one, and then 10-15 of tuning.

The Debian package didn't play well with Apache completely -- wwsympa 
wants to run as the sympa user, while we usually expect Apache to run as 
www-data.  I ended up adding sympa to the www-data group as a 
workaround.  That's not directly their problem though, but the Debian 
packagers, and there might be a better and known solution out there that 
I missed.

The command-line tool to create and delete lists worked well, that I 
remember, and made it pretty simple to write a Perl module wrappering it 
for adding and deleting lists, for pulling Sympa into the system.

The actual *settings* for the lists created I didn't finish -- 
specifically having it read the users from an LDAP filter.  However, at 
that point I was hitting a time crunch and instead focused on making 
sure the parts I'd finished were properly tested and working, so it's 
not necessarily that there was anything wrong or difficult there other 
than just getting used to Sympa (which even after, I don't feel like I 
am, just that I focused on a couple of tiny slices of it).

Looking at things where I left it, I think I almost had all the bits, 
but wasn't sure where to bring them together completely.  The module I 
wrote had a create_list function that would take 
listname/subject/desc/owners, fill the data into a template, save the 
result as an XML file, and then pass that file as the input settings for 
the new list.  I believe I'd gotten it working as a static list, then 
had begun to change the settings over to fill in what was needed for 
getting the subscribers from LDAP.  But the issue there was as much 
specifics on our LDAP setup as anything else.. I think I had all the 
bits in question, just needed to pull them together with some help.

So to reiterate, I do wish I had an answer there, but Sympa didn't seem 
to be that difficult to domesticate, aside from the fact it's a big and 
busy mailing list manager and there were lots of things to look over to 
feel even vaguely up to speed.  Well, okay, I shouldn't be sorry that 
the system was friendly enough there, it's just a shame that I can't 
think of anything useful for the opportunity. :)  The biggest thing I 
think that's of use in any future Sympa work is to find someone who does 
know the program itself well enough to check my work, see if anything's 
missing or could be done better, etc.

-- 
Jon Robertson

-- 
Digant C Kasundra 
<>
Technical Lead, ITS Unix Systems and Applications, Stanford University