[Alioth-staff-replacement] Mailman (lists.alioth) data migration from old infra

[Thomas Goirand]

On 12/27/2017 07:45 PM, Toni Mueller wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> On Wed, Dec 27, 2017 at 01:11:10PM -0500, Sergio Durigan Junior wrote:
>> Thanks for doing this!  A question (that may have been answered already,
>> sorry): you mention that this new ml system will be available "for a
>> limited period of a few years".  Do we have a plan to officially support
>> the mailing lists after that, or is it going be each group's
>> responsibility to have its own ml setup in another infra?
> 
> I have once written some software to fiddle with the subscription
> database of Mailman2, and I guess that it's not rocket science to write
> some software to migrate to a different infrastructure. I can understand
> quite well if someone wants to avoid the migration work.
> 
> Semi-OT:
> What Mailman2 has over mlmmj, is a useful web interface for many tasks.

That's the thing, I don't believe the web interface is of any use,
especially if you use MLMMJ, which has everything through mail commands.
Also, the contrib folder of MLMMJ has a few web interface, for example
for moderation (I wrote that one...), and for controlling flags of the
lists.

> What mlmmj has over Mailman2, is a much easier to handle configuration,
> and likely much lighter resource usage.

Indeed, Mailman is horrible to configure, and need a specific subdomain,
while MLMMJ just integrates as a "normal" mail address for any
(sub)domain of the server.

Also, MLMMJ is fully written in C, and is much faster than Mailman. It's
used for example for all Gentoo and SuSE lists. I would happily help
configure it with Postfix if you need (though it's *really* strait forward).

On 12/27/2017 06:22 PM, Dominic Hargreaves wrote:
> The idea is to provide a simple migration of selected lists to provide
> a bridge between the shutdown of alioth and other long-term options.

I don't think migration to MLMMJ would be hard, especially if you let
lists admins to configure them (ie: the only thing you *really* need to
do is get the mail archives, subscriber lists, and that's about it).

> As far as I know, Mailman 2 will continue to be maintained
> for the foreseeable future, so I have no particular concerns there.

I'm also very much concerns that your plan is only to maintain the lists
for "a few years", without more details. In my book, "a few years" means
more than 2. Mailman 2 is written in Python 2. This alone is a path you
want to avoid, since Python 2 will be EOL in 2020 (that's in 2 years
from now). So at least, I would strongly advise for using at least
Mailman 3 (but preferably MLMMJ). Also, what is going to happen after
that period? Are you asking everyone to migrate to something else?

I really would have preferred if the DSA allowed someone to administer
the lists on a DSA machine, and more sustainable plan.

Cheers,

Thomas Goirand (zigo)