Rip out or redesign the topic system

[Barry Warsaw]

At Pycon, it was observed that the topic system as it exists in mm2.1 isn't really all that useful. Terri had some thoughts about that in regards to work that Systers did. This is mostly a placeholder for future ideas and to get it out of my TODO list. :)

[Adam (a8am)]

(Please correct me if the ticketing system is the wrong place for this.)

Is there any roadmap for this, and/or documentation of any proposed replacement? We require a subset of the topics functionality -- topics for a message would be set by a moderator so we don't need to parse the message body (which I'm assuming is the awkward part) but we would need the other pieces: the list of topics in the MailingList model, the header metadata handling in Tagger, and the filtering behavior in MemberRecipients. So we are very interested in whatever the roadmap holds for those components.

[Barry Warsaw (barry)]

On Dec 03, 2014, at 09:35 PM, Adam wrote:

>(Please correct me if the ticketing system is the wrong place for this.)

It's the right place.

>Is there any roadmap for this, and/or documentation of any proposed
>replacement?

Not at the moment. In general we want to look at the dlists implementation
that Systers built on MM2. Our plans are vague atm though. Would love to
have more discussion about this on the -developers list.

[Mark Sapiro (msapiro)]

No. There is no roadmap nor documentation.

In Mailman 2.1, topic regexps don't actually work as documented, but other than that, they do more or less work. The regexp issue is addressed in the branch at lp:mailman/2.2 - see the NEWS file in that branch for more detail of that issue.

There is also a defunct branch at lp:~msapiro/mailman/topics which implemented the ability for a list member to receive only those list posts which matched no topic to fix <https://bugs.launchpad.net/mailman/+bug/255418>.

The bottom line is nothing more is planned to be done in MM 2.1 at this time. There may be work on this in the future in MM 3.

[Abhilash Raj (raj-abhilash1)]

This bug has been moved to the new gitlab repo here: https://gitlab.com/mailman/mailman/issues/40