Hello, fellow Lassoers!

Currently, we use Mailman to handle our listserv needs. We have about 160 list names. Most of them have about 50-100 members, but a few have upwards of 1,500.

We use Lasso to interact with a MySQL database to keep track of members' permissions for each list (ie., can post, can receive, etc.). Lasso is also SUPPOSED to talk to the Mailman server to add/remove users, as well as to modify their permissions when changes are made. I feel pretty confident in our implementation, but we always like a safety net.

As such, our safety net has been to use Python on the Mailman server to directly interact with Mailman's APIs. Through a series of scripts, Python flushes out the local membership data, pulls down the users from the MySQL database, and repopulates the lists. This process runs nightly, and takes upwards of 2 minutes to run.

There are two big problems with this setup. First, none of us here know Python, nor do we have the time to learn it, which makes the maintenance of these scripts a potential problem down the road. Second, the particular MySQL connectors for Python are for significantly older versions of Mac OS, and with each new release of Mac OS X, this could eventually also become a problem.

As such, I'd like to use Lasso to handle this process, still making use of the scripts that interact with Mailman and not MySQL.

Not knowing really anything about Python, I'd like to know what thoughts people have regarding this approach. Can Lasso handle this as elegantly as Python? Will comparing a map of 1,500 MySQL entries to Mailman's current membership bring things to a screeching halt? Any "gotchas" that anyone can think of?

Thanks!
Dave
---
Dave Bruhn
Systems Analyst
North Carolina Hospital Association
PO Box 4449
Cary, NC 27519-4449
919-677-4145 (office)
dbruhn@ncha.org
http://www.ncha.org


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