Merging Configurations ...

[paddy]

Hi,

Julian, Thanks again for that last patch, I really am wowed by quantity,
quality and timeliness of your work on mailscanner.

I've been nursing some (probably rather braindead) ideas for
some time, and the time has come to bring them to the list
to be put out their misery.

This is where I am:

        Problem Statement:

                Have a virtual hosting system serving MailScanned mail.
                        (kudos to Julian, and the thousands of other
                        developers who make this possible)

                Want a per-site/per-user (web)gui.

        Ideas:

                1. somehow use or extend the existing webmin interface

                First thought was to extend, putting all the funtionality
                in the webmin fe, I guess that would get fairly complex.

                (just looked at the webpage,
                        Is this on the todo list, Richard?)

                When I first looked at MailScanner I half expected
                to find per-user .mailscanner.conf files.  Given that
                this seems to be no.1 FAQ on the list (rulesets, dammit!)
                I'd guess I'm probably not alone.  By the time I got the
                clue, I was already nursing this idea.  At first I looked
                at modifying Config.pm to make that a viable method of
                configuration, encouraged by the comment

# Read the configuration file. Doesn't allow includes yet...

                but then I gave up on that.  Somewhere along the way,
                I (perhaps erroneously) recall Julian making a comment
                along the lines of 'write a config compiler' which I
                may or may not have misinterpreted, but I got to thinking
                along a line I wouldn't normally pursue:

                What if there were a program that could merge mailscanner
                configurations?

                Perhaps such a thing might be useful for migrating users
                from one system to another, and it has a nice feeling of
                implementing a 'mathematical' operation on the object
                'a configuration', but of course I'm thinking of per-user
                .mailscanner.conf files again.  Which would make using
                the existing webmin code that much easier.  Really
                attractive was independence from the main program easing
                implementation. (I abandonned the previous line of development
                largely because the changes got so intrusive, that I
                couldn't imagine anyone wanting to include them). Until
                I got to the implementation stage.  Feel free to correct
                me, but I've concluded that the only sane way to implement
                this is to re-use Config.pm, but (my perl is too weak to
                know if it's just me) I fancy it would need to change a bit.
                For example I would need to be able to read more than one
                configuration, and get access to the contents of vars
                like StaticScalars.

                Can these be done without change?

                Does such a purpose/program sound worthwhile enough to
                make changes for?

                (Not so long ago I posted something on comp.sendmail along the
                lines of "when I do this it hurts", and when I got the
                inevitable reply, I still persisted with "but it should be
                like this ...".  Hopefully I'm not doing that here.)

        or      2. use the LDAP conf, and put a gui on that.

                I guess this is probably the right thing to do, but my
                experience with ldap is minimal, and I've yet
                to track down the relevant mailscanner-specific
                howto, schema, etc.  Any pointers ?

                besides which I imagine the ldap option to be less lightweight.

        or      3. it already exists, and I've missed.

                I can wear the red-face, if someone can point me in
                the right dirtection.

Sorry for such a long email, but, again, I am driven by a specific
requirement.  Given the popularity of platforms like the cobalt,
I would imagaine there are a lot of other potential users.

Oh, and Congratulations on 200,000!

Regards,


Paddy

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