Adam Minski writes:

I think the mailman shell way isn't persistent,

I don't understand what you mean by "persistent" here. I take that to mean that once you change the list attributes, they stay changed until you change them again. But that doesn't seem to make sense.

and I would prefer some kind of config file. I have not found any helpful yet.

There isn't a config file yet, except the Python modules in src/mailman/styles. You have to hack the Python or write SQL.

We're currently working on this but we don't have working code yet, let alone anything we can release. The code we're starting from is designed to allow you to start from a base style, tweak the configuration, and either save the new configuration as a complete style, or save the difference as a mix-in style. There will also be some kind of export/import facility, which you could treat as a config file, I guess.

Steve

Steven,

many thanks for your answer. Probably my question was not carefully worded enough.

What I like to do is creating new or modifying existing styles to have reasonable defaults for creating new lists. If I create a new style using the mailman shell as stated by the documentation, the new style is gone as default after restarting mailman server. Maybe i must store the new style into the database, but for me it looks like defaults are coded into src/mailman/styles files.

If I understood you correctly the only way at the moment is hacking the source code, which I always try to avoid without getting changes upstream. Is this correct?

What did you mean with "or write SQL"? Are the style defaults stored at database level? This would bypass the upstream problem.

Thx. Adam

On 10/19/21 4:36 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

Adam Minski writes:

...

I think the mailman shell way isn't persistent,

I don't understand what you mean by "persistent" here. I take that to mean that once you change the list attributes, they stay changed until you change them again. But that doesn't seem to make sense.

...

and I would prefer some kind of config file. I have not found any helpful yet.

There isn't a config file yet, except the Python modules in src/mailman/styles. You have to hack the Python or write SQL.

We're currently working on this but we don't have working code yet, let alone anything we can release. The code we're starting from is designed to allow you to start from a base style, tweak the configuration, and either save the new configuration as a complete style, or save the difference as a mix-in style. There will also be some kind of export/import facility, which you could treat as a config file, I guess.

Steve

Andreas Barth writes:

Which would mean: if I change a template later on, all the lists adopt behavour.

I'm not sure how easy it is to implement that.

Also, I think Abhilash suggested it might cause more problems than it solves. Sure, if you get an improved version of a style (say, it manages to make anonymous lists more anonymous) you'd like that to apply to all anonymous lists. But there are some changes that probably shouldn't be made to all lists using a particular style, but you want them to constitute a new style. Then you either need to make a mixin style, and apply it to all the lists that need it, or you need to "freeze" the configuration of all the lists that shouldn't get it. Both approaches are fairly annoying, and a change that makes anonymous lists *less* anonymous could be outright hazardous to someone's health.

However, that isn't the current way. However, currently, the template is copied into the list config at creation time,

That is what "template" means, after all.