At Thu, 12 Jul 2012 17:44:37 +0900, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
Alexander Sulfrian writes:
If the list_name would be also reversed, it could lead to some surprising subtree clashing. For example web2.0 would be in the same subtree like something1.0 (people sometimes use strange list names...).
I agree that list_name should *not* be reversed; it is an atom.
This "atomicity" is a problem. We have three different namespaces and syntaxes to deal with here: RFC 5322 email addresses, RFC 2919 List-Ids, and RFC 5536. In RFC 5322, there's a special class, the "dotted-atom", which may be used in the mailbox component of an address (and thus denotes an atomic resource). But not in RFC 5536, where dots aren't allowed in newsgroup name components. I think this is a problem for post-GSoC, though.
Even with the current implementation the group names are ugly.
I would expect that MUA presentations will deal with this. For example, exploiting the hierarchy, the dots could appear as breadcrumbs:
mailman > org > python > mailman-developers MAILMAN-DEVELOPERS [summary lines] [current message header info such as author, subject, date] [current message body]
Yeah, it is currently working this way. The ugly names, I refered to, occur for example with "web2.0@example.com":
com > example > web2 > 0
Thunderbird is even more ugly. It shorten the name in the overview to display only the first letter of each subtree:
c.e.w.0
But as you said, I will leave it for now in this state and keep in mind, that we should find a better solution in future.
Maybe we should eliminate the dots from the list names by default and only allow separate groups with the alias mechanism?
Quite possibly, but don't worry about it for the purposes of GSoC I think. The worst that would happen is that a few, relatively unusual lists would be inaccessible. But I think dealing with this requires some thought, so let's not get committed to a hasty design. Document that dotted names may show strange behavior (including being inaccessible), and move on for now.
Despite of having a unusual name all lists should be accessible. The current implementation should not lead to inaccessible groups. So I think it is acceptable for now.