Top Document: Mailing list management software FAQ Previous Document: 1.01 Using someone else's MLM Next Document: 2.01 How much money, time, and expertise do you have? See reader questions & answers on this topic! - Help others by sharing your knowledge One of two philosophies is behind any program's design: "big is beautiful" or "small is beautiful." AT&T's original design for Unix was "small is beautiful": small tools exist for every purpose, and they can be linked together in defined ways to accomplish most goals. On the other hand, Larry Wall designed Perl, a program many people now think of as an essential Unix tool, in the "big is beautiful" model: by combining features of sed, awk, C, and the shell, he came up with something he and others believe is more than the sum of its parts. Why should you care? Well, maybe you don't need to, but this "big vs. small" dichotomy goes a long way toward describing the differences between the available MLM's. Look at the differences between Majordomo and LISTSERV as examples of each approach, and see which appeals to you more. (TULP is probably an even better example than Majordomo, but I know Majordomo better and will therefore use it for this discussion.) When Brent Chapman originally wrote Majordomo, it was clearly a "small is beautiful" program. He had tried to compile and set up ListProc and gotten frustrated; he whipped together something in Perl that would do what he needed. What he needed, specifically, was something to automatically manage the addition and removal of subscriber names from his Sendmail alias lists. As Majordomo was originally written, maintaining the alias lists was the entire extent of its job -- *all* other work was handled by other programs. Majordomo has expanded considerably since then (certainly beyond Brent's original plans -- he has written that he thinks even the addition of file server functions was a mistake, as they can be served as well or better by dedicated archive servers), but the people working on it have tried to maintain its purity of vision. Majordomo tends to see most things in terms of Unix regular expressions and Sendmail alias lists: for example, the Majordomo equivalent of the LISTSERV "set digest" and "set nomail" commands (which cause a user's mail to be batched, or not to be sent) is simple: to stop getting mail, the user unsubscribes; to get digests, the user unsubscribes, then resubscribes to a separate digest list. This approach obviously has limits -- LISTSERV offers dozens of options, for example, and there can't be a list for each combination -- but that's OK, because Majordomo doesn't want to provide every option, it wants to manage lists and let other programs handle other jobs. Because Majordomo is relatively small and focused, it is comprehensible as a whole by many of the people who use it. This, along with its free source code, can explain much of its popularity. LISTSERV, on the other hand, is the MLM poster child for "big is beautiful" programs. As its users needed more features for various functions, Eric Thomas added them to LISTSERV; his program attempts to satisfy every need a mailing-list subscriber could have, and it does it in a fairly integrated way. However, LISTSERV and kin (primarily ListProc and Mailbase) are more complex programs than the simple MLM's like Majordomo and TULP. User Contributions:Top Document: Mailing list management software FAQ Previous Document: 1.01 Using someone else's MLM Next Document: 2.01 How much money, time, and expertise do you have? Single Page [ Usenet FAQs | Web FAQs | Documents | RFC Index ] Send corrections/additions to the FAQ Maintainer: naleks@Library.UMMED.EDU
Last Update March 27 2014 @ 02:11 PM
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