Hi all. A concept for a feature under BugId 359251

[Leon KUKOVEC]

Hi all,

My name is Leon. I'm working on a patch that will make
Bugzilla 'email distribution list' aware. The same has
been discussed under https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=359251

The idea is to use 'group membership' and regular 'user registration forms'
and keep the changes to the DB schema minimal or if possible,
avoid changes at all.

Brief concept:

Bugzilla Administration required:
   1. a new group 'email_list' is created to indicate that certain
       login_names are actually an email distribution lists
   2. a new login_name 'group1 at email.com' is created and given
       'email_list' group membership
   3. a new group 'group1 at email.com' is created to function as a
       container for all members in the list
   4. user 'john.doe at email.com' is granted a group membership of
       'group1 at email.com' group, indicating he's a member of the list

Just with that, anyone can select 'group1 at email.com' and add it to
Assignee, QA, CC or anywhere we put users. But this results
duplicate e-mails if the members of the 'group1 at email.com' are
also on CC, or. To avoid that, the code-base needs to be
changed as described below.

Bugzilla codebase changes:
   1. adjust the code in a way to "unroll/resolve" the login_names
      (e.g. group1 at email.com), which are actually mailing lists,
       to the list of login_names belonging to the group with the same name.
   2. when unrolled/resolved, make a union of all affected
      login_names to remove duplicates before sending e-mail

Based on the current investigation this would have to be done in
whine.pl and processbug.cgi and some
helper method in Bugzilla::Group, etc.

Please let me know whether the described idea seems reasonable or not and
whether I should continue working on it or if something else is queued for
the BugId 359251.

Thanks.

-- 
Best Regards,
        Leon