Hunter-
Each of those steps would be to make one act more like other. This implies developing one of the paths to the point where an acceptable system is achieved. As I have shown, there are no worries to be had about this potentially precarious process as I have already hacked through phpbb, and I am a pythoneer, thus am very comfortable with the internals of mailman.
That's fine. Just keep in mind that the mailing list functionality needs to continue to operate as it does now.
I have already presented why:specifically to conduct my research and development on the wikipedia machine in a completely open fashion. I have monitered the lists here over time, and there has even been a thread about granting everyone on wikipedia shell access. Were this idea fact by this point, I would have had a shell account 7 months ago.
Wikipedia is not a shell account provider. If you beg long enough, you will probably get access, but you have to understand that this is a significantly bigger issue than sysop access. I would not be surprised if shell users could read LocalSettings.php and read the database server access settings, for example.
There's nothing stopping you from going to
http://sourceforge.net/ http://developer.berlios.de/ http://savannah.gnu.org/
and setting up a new project for whatever you're trying to do. These all provide free hosting and CVS for open source projects. BerliOS also provides a MySQL database. So you can develop all the code openly if you want to. You can install mailman locally and use the Wikipedia archives for experimenting. I really don't see why you would need shell access to accomplish anything you are trying to accomplish.
Regards,
Erik