ubuntu-devel and ubuntu-devel-discuss

[Barry Warsaw]

On Mar 2, 2007, at 1:31 PM, Matt Zimmerman wrote:

> However, this is likely to have the undesirable side effect of  
> causing a lot
> of ubuntu-devel-discuss traffic to end up in the ubuntu-devel  
> moderation
> queue.  Since we want to keep that chore to a minimum, it would be  
> good to
> find a way to avoid this.
>
> One technical solution would be to drop messages which would  
> otherwise be
> moderated if they've gone to ubuntu-devel-discuss.  I don't know  
> whether
> this is straightforward to implement in Mailman.  Are there other
> suggestions?

One possible technical solution would be to set max_days_to_hold to  
some non-zero value.  A value > 0 tells Mailman to automatically  
discard held postings after that number of days.  This is possibly  
non-ideal because it's non-discriminatory on what messages it discards.

It's also possible to write a custom handler for the ubuntu-devel  
mailing list, assuming you're comfortable with a non-standard Mailman  
instance.  The general idea would be to look for cross-posted  
messages that contain an In-Reply-To header.  If you get a match,  
then this is (probably) a reply to a previously cross-posted  
message.  In that case, the handler would raise DiscardMessage and  
the message would be unceremoniously dropped.  Checking for the In- 
Reply-To header allows the original cross-post to go through the  
normal moderation steps.

Making composition lists is one of the things I'd like to tackle for  
the next version of Mailman, but there are several sticky issues to  
address.  It's probably best to talk about that more on the mailman- 
developers at python.org mailing list.

-Barry