ubuntu-devel and ubuntu-devel-discuss

[Barry Warsaw]

On Mar 7, 2007, at 2:16 PM, Matt Zimmerman wrote:

> On Wed, Mar 07, 2007 at 10:51:10AM -0500, Barry Warsaw wrote:
>> 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.
>
> Right, this means that when moderation resources run short, we drop
> legitimate messages, something we definitely want to avoid.

Yep, generally not a good thing (but some people really wanted this  
feature).

>> 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.
>
> We may already have a non-standard mailman instance, though in any  
> case, the
> people who need to be comfortable are the Canonical sysadmins who  
> manage it.

Looks like we do.

> Do you think this is a good approach?  Do you know of other  
> installations
> which face this problem (crossposting between moderated and  
> unmoderated
> lists)?

I haven't heard of anyone trying to do something similar.  I would be  
more comfortable with such a handler than e.g. trying to use umbrella  
lists, which are a gross hack that will go away.  I think the handler  
would be pretty simple.

-Barry