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

[Dominic Hargreaves]

On Wed, Dec 27, 2017 at 10:06:52PM +0100, Thomas Goirand wrote:
> 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).

That's still a very different prospect to syncing the data and config
over from one system to another in the mailman case, and imposing a 
completely different user interface on everyone at short notice where
that is avoidable. This is clearly a subjective topic, but I
don't share your view that mlmmj is obviously the superior tool here.

> > 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?

This is indeed a stop-gap to give people more time to move away
from lists.alioth.debian.org than is allowed by the shutdown of the
existing infrastructure (ie at least one stable release).

It's interesting to hear that python 2 is set to be EOL in 2020; I
didn't know that.

If for some reason there ends up being a future for lists.alioth that
extends beyond the current plans, that would be the time to revisit
the choice of software.

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

This option was explored, but discarded as DSA's offering does not
include the root access that would be needed to manage a mailman setup.
By the way, this is no different to the current alioth setup, except that
the hardware itself is, I believe, Debian-owned.

Dominic.