[PATCH] Mailman solution to Cc:s to users on mailing lists

[Ben Gertzfield <che@debian.org>]

Well, I put my money where my mouth is and came up with a solution to
all the feuding about whether or not users should Cc: the author when
replying to a list mail.

This patch is against Mailman CVS and has been sent upstream; it
allows per-user configuration if they want list duplicates.

Duplicates will not be sent if the user enables this option in the
following cases:

1) If the user is on multiple mailing lists that are all in the
   To:/Cc:/etc. fields, they will only get one list copy.

2) If the user is specifically mentioned in the To:/Cc:/etc. fields,
   the list will not send them a copy.

To build Mailman CVS on Debian unstable, you will need the following
three patches:

http://nausicaa.interq.or.jp/mailman/with-python.patch
http://nausicaa.interq.or.jp/mailman/members-flag.patch
http://nausicaa.interq.or.jp/mailman/no-dupes.patch

Mailman CVS is available from
CVSROOT=:pserver:anonymous@cvs.mailman.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/mailman

The first patch is needed because Debian unstable uses
/usr/bin/python2 for Python 2.0, which is required for Mailman CVS.
But many Mailman scripts had:

#! /usr/bin/env python 

hard-coded in their shebang lines, so I wrote a patch to autoconfize
these programs.  Now ./configure --with-python=/usr/bin/python2 works
with Mailman.

The second patch fixes a silly bug in CVS mailman, which prevents
users from being able to actually set their options. (This should be
fixed quickly, so my patch may not be needed by the time folks read
this.)

The third patch is the actual patch to prevent duplicates from being
sent to users.  The default is to send out duplicates, to keep the
same behavior as old Mailman.

Anyway, I know the current lists don't use Mailman, but when/if they
do, it's the right solution.  Mailman CVS is just amazing, especially
with the latest i18n support: users can choose language settings
per-list for all web interfaces and system mails now!

Ben

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