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Subject: Re: (Semi-OT) Successfully using Mailman with Postfix?
From: Lorrie Wood (lwoodsnugharbor.com)
Date: Wed Sep 13 2000 - 10:12:03 CDT

On Wed, Sep 13, 2000 at 12:28:59PM +0000, Ralf Hildebrandt wrote:
> On 13 Sep 2000 14:15:11 +0200, Bruno L. F. Cabral <brunoopenline.com.br> wrote:
>
> >I've heard many times that majordomo is bad because it's perl,
> >it's "interpreted" etc.
>
> Perl is IMHO simply unintellegible, hard to read, and even harder to
> maintain. Clearly a "write once" language.

        There's an old joke, patterned after _The Empire Strikes Back_,
originally committed to rec.humor.funny by funkstermidwinter.com:

EXTERIOR: DAGOBAH--DAY
           With Yoda strapped to his back, Luke climbs up one of the
        many thick vines that grow in the swamp until he reaches the
        Dagobah statistics lab. Panting heavily, he continues his
        exercises--grepping, installing new packages, logging in as
        root, and writing replacements for two-year-old shell scripts
        in Python.

YODA: Code! Yes. A programmer's strength flows from code maintainability.
      But beware of Perl. Terse syntax... more than one way to do it...
      default variables. The dark side of code maintainability are they.
      Easily they flow, quick to join you when code you write. If once
      you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny,
      consume you it will.

LUKE: Is Perl better than Python?

YODA: No... no... no. Quicker, easier, more seductive.

LUKE: But how will I know why Python is better than Perl?

YODA: You will know. When your code you try to read six months from
      now.

> >so may I ask why use mailman (which
> >is written in python) instead of listar (C)?
>
> The programs of mailman are small, a mixture of both C and Python; even it's
> Python components are compiled. Besides Mailman's development is active...

        I think, Ralf, you didn't see that the querent was asking about
mailman vs listar -- your answers seem to imply you're talking about
mailman vs majordomo: majordomo has several programs and 1.x development
is moribund.

        Listar has exactly one program, which when stripped is 188KB.
There are some loadable modules, which all together add up to half a meg.
The modules are because the program is, well, modular.

        Development's quite active (the authors are always replying to
queries on their mailing list). The software is labelled Alpha, yes, but
authors and users alike all comment on how stable it is, and they plan to
make the next release 1.0 in light of that.

        Listar, like Mailman, has a built-in web interface. Unlike
Mailman, however, it's possible to directly edit the configuration
files *without* extracting them from a hash and shoving them back into
one.

        The feature list is taken in large part from non-free LISTSERV.

        The only real drawback -- and this is a large one -- is that
the documentation is very sadly lacking. There're readme's, proper
docs that are woefully incomplete, and the mailing list archives are
rather robust, but it's just not all compiled in one easy-to-digest
chunk.

        If you never were one for reading directions anyway, that may
not be a problem for you, but it's really worth mentioning.

-- Lorrie