Whines to Mailing Lists

[Ben Bell-3]

I have a client with a feature request for bugzilla. They want to be
able to send whine mails to lists as well as just users and groups.

I'm new to the bugzilla code base but at a glance it looks like I'll
probably want to:

1) define database table(s) for the lists and possible permissioning rules
2) add handling for a MAILTO_LIST type everywhere MAILTO_* is used
3) add support in the front end code for defining and managing mail lists
4) add support to the whines page for mail lists as a type

Does this seem a reasonable approach? Is there any other work in
progress or completed to support this sort of thing?

bjb


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[Max Kanat-Alexander]

On 10/01/2009 05:16 AM, Ben Bell wrote:
> I have a client with a feature request for bugzilla. They want to be
> able to send whine mails to lists as well as just users and groups.

        How does a list differ from a group?

        -Max
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[Ben Bell-3]

On Thu, Oct 01, 2009 at 05:19:58AM -0700, Max Kanat-Alexander wrote:
> On 10/01/2009 05:16 AM, Ben Bell wrote:
> > I have a client with a feature request for bugzilla. They want to be
> > able to send whine mails to lists as well as just users and groups.
>
> How does a list differ from a group?

As far as I can tell from my brief perusal, groups are collections of
bugzilla users with no email address of their own. What we effectively
want is to be able to send mails to external email addresses other than
those belonging to individual bugzilla users.

bjb


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[Max Kanat-Alexander]

On 10/01/2009 05:24 AM, Ben Bell wrote:
> What we effectively
> want is to be able to send mails to external email addresses other than
> those belonging to individual bugzilla users.

        Okay. So basically this is just the ability to send whines to email
addresses without a Bugzilla account. Depending on how invasive it is,
it's possible we'd be interested in having it upstream. (If it's very
invasive or adds too much complexity, the complexity would overwhelm the
benefit of including it in Bugzilla itself.)

        -Max
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[Gregary Hendricks]

>>> On 10/1/2009 at 07:36 AM, in message <4AC4B057.3060009@...>, Max
Kanat-Alexander <mkanat@...> wrote:

> On 10/01/2009 05:24 AM, Ben Bell wrote:
> > What we effectively
> > want is to be able to send mails to external email addresses other than
> > those belonging to individual bugzilla users.
>  
> Okay. So basically this is just the ability to send whines to email
> addresses without a Bugzilla account. Depending on how invasive it is,
> it's possible we'd be interested in having it upstream. (If it's very
> invasive or adds too much complexity, the complexity would overwhelm the
> benefit of including it in Bugzilla itself.)

Why not just create an account with the list email address as the email address?
We do this all the time. Fake user with foo-list@... as the email. Then we can assign bugs, set in CC or QA to our hearts content and everyone gets the bug mail.

Greg

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[David Marshall-5]

On 10/1/09 2:48 PM, "Gregary Hendricks" <ghendricks@...> wrote:

>>>> On 10/1/2009 at 07:36 AM, in message <4AC4B057.3060009@...>, Max
> Kanat-Alexander <mkanat@...> wrote:
>> On 10/01/2009 05:24 AM, Ben Bell wrote:
>>> What we effectively
>>> want is to be able to send mails to external email addresses other than
>>> those belonging to individual bugzilla users.
>>  
>> Okay. So basically this is just the ability to send whines to email
>> addresses without a Bugzilla account. Depending on how invasive it is,
>> it's possible we'd be interested in having it upstream. (If it's very
>> invasive or adds too much complexity, the complexity would overwhelm the
>> benefit of including it in Bugzilla itself.)
>
> Why not just create an account with the list email address as the email
> address?
> We do this all the time. Fake user with foo-list@... as the
> email. Then we can assign bugs, set in CC or QA to our hearts content and
> everyone gets the bug mail.

We do much the same at Yahoo!

However, that's a little bit different from having whines for that user.
Some of our users have expressed a desire to send whines to another user
that happens to be a mailing list.  We usually demur, saying that we don't
allow users to create whines for other users.

It's really rather trivial to redirect email that you get to whomever you
like.  We advise those interested in the capability to set up whines for
themselves and filter/forward them as needed.  There's a lot of information
in the mail headers.

How would you know that the external email address really does want mail
from Bugzilla?  Doesn't this just make it really easy to turn Bugzilla into
a spam machine?

Dealing with email capabilities is so annoying that I believe Bugzilla
should be doing less with email rather than adding new email-related
capabilities.  When you can get the results of a search by RSS, doesn't that
lower the value of the whine capability?

If we absolutely must have this, perhaps it should be a list view that
corresponds to the email that whine presents, so that I can perform a search
and send off the results as I choose.

In my crontab:

*/15 * * * * curl
http://bugzilla.foo.com/buglist.cgi?cmdtype=runnamed&namedcmd=important&ctyp
e=whine | mail my-mailing-list@...

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[Ben Bell-3]

On Thu, Oct 01, 2009 at 03:12:41PM -0700, David Marshall wrote:
> How would you know that the external email address really does want mail
> from Bugzilla?  Doesn't this just make it really easy to turn Bugzilla into
> a spam machine?
I don't really see that moving the facility from a faked up user to its
own entity makes much difference here, assuming the same controls on who
can set things up exist.

> When you can get the results of a search by RSS, doesn't that
> lower the value of the whine capability?
If your users use RSS, perhaps.

> In my crontab:
Again, if the administrators of the bugzilla system are happy to
maintain crontabs, that works.

But those things don't match the client's requirements in my case :)


I'm working against 3.0.4 so when the code's done I'll post the patch
and if the bugzilla devs like it, I'll port it to head. If not, no harm
done -- the client gets their functionality either way.

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[Ben Bell-3]

On Thu, Oct 01, 2009 at 06:36:23AM -0700, Max Kanat-Alexander wrote:
> Depending on how invasive it is, it's possible we'd be interested in
> having it upstream.

FYI, I've attached the patch to newly create issue #522258. It was
developed against 3.0.4 and ported forward. I'm hoping to have a chance
to look into the proper process (test results and the like) but as there
was doubt as to its usefulness, before I expend any more effort on I
wanted to get it out there and visible.

bjb


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