Let's get it started!

Hello readers!

So the community bonding period has finally ended. It was a fun experience discussing ideas and designs with Florian, my mentor. We had numerous meetings with intense brainstorming involved, specially regarding the design part.

First let me share one of the design board I made over these meetings - https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/1b79uUHsDd1WHZQ9sZsVLTcra0eW0CA6Qc1h3ySpRY0E/edit?usp=sharing

OK so let me give you some context. I am building a message queue based archiving interface. For me, as I have been investigating various backends to perform the message queues part, implemeting message queue part is not really a challenge anymore. Infact I had developed prototypes for some message queue backends(RabbitMQ and ZeroMQ) while preparing my proposal and researching about project. During the community bonding period, I revisited RabbitMQ and found that it perfectly fits the needs, and is fairly simple to use and integrate. Thus in our first meeting, me and Florian decided to go with RabbitMQ as our primary backend(ZeroMQ will be looked into once we are done with this).

Link to prototype(RabbitMQ) : https://gitlab.com/anirudhdahiya9/message-queues-prototypes

Now the challenging part remains understanding the minor details about how the archiver interface is loaded, what all functions it has to perform, and how it can be made to function under varying configurations. Also the configurations can be saved in ini style files, and these may be loaded and used on the fly. BASICALLY HOW WE ARE GOING TO INTEGRATE IT WITH CURRENT MAILMAN SERVER.

To tackle this, I spent days going over the codebase multiple times, and trying to come up with how the message queues part shall interact. One nice suggestion by Florian proved very fruitful to me was to go about it in a testing module manner, i.e. think of all the tests our interface should be subject to, and what should be the input and expected output of these. This led me into researching about unittest module, tox, and reading pre-existing tests for current archiving modules. This led me to a more firm understanding of the interface design.

Next, we actually discussed design. I had some things in my mind, but over irc it gets difficult to express those ideas. This led me to making diagrams explaining my ideas, and also allowed Florian to ask me his doubts about my ideas, and also provide suggestions. After two or maybe three meetings of intense discussions, we finalised on a simple architectural design(calling interface each time for each archiver) that is practical and clean. But still I have a solution in my mind(using publish model) which has one flaw, and I shall try my hands at it once the simple design is implemented.

The coding period has already begun, and as of writing this, I have made the interface python package, installed it in my virtualenv, and it shows up in postorius. It also has a bit dirty code for the message queue part, but as I mentioned, that isn't a problem.
Hoping to rock this project!

Have an awesome Summer!