[Pkg-mailman-hackers] Moderation action "None" is misleading

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Adding mailman-users at mailman3.org.
Technical suggestions should go to distro channels or to Mailman's
issue tracker: https://gitlab.com/mailman/mailman/-/issues/1176.
Further discussion of technical details is best done there.

Thomas Krichel writes:
 >   Stephen J. Turnbull writes

 > > Debian has traditionally been quite slow to update Mailman,
 > 
 >   And now it has the addition issue that Debian testing python
 >   standard it 3.13, so the nntplib is no longer supported.
 >   Thus the current Mailman debian testing appears broken.

That's Debian's problem, as we currently don't support Python 3.13,
although of course we intend to.  This is the only issue that came up
in a quick search of Mailman's issue tracker for Python 3.13 (but I
did not check the other subprojects such as Postorius).  I conclude
that not a lot of work has been done on supporting Python 3.13 (rather
than the optimistic "there's nothing to be done").  From Mailman's
point of view, users have two excellent options for the forseeable
future: (1) don't gateway list <-> newsgroups (2) install Mailman into
a Python 3.9--3.12 virtual environment.

I'm sympathetic to the needs of the Debian developers, and at this
point for 99% of software it's perfectly reasonable to aim to use 3.13
in the next Debian release.  Unfortunately for Mailman users on Debian
hosts that's not high on our list of priorities since we recommend a
virtual environment installation in any case.

At present there seem to be three ways forward for Debian packaging:

1.  Remove NNTP support.  (In honor of larsi, I'd rather not.)
2.  Add nntplib.py from the Python 3.12 nntplib, as a stopgap until
    option 3 can be implemented.  I can't speak for other developers
    but we might be willing to add it as a contrib module, especially
    if that might make life easier for distro packagers.  It's
    suboptimal though since that absolutely has to be considered
    techical debt that will need to be paid someday.
3.  Port Mailman to pynntp (that may need to be Debian packaged, too),
    which has seen a revival of activity and two feature releases
    since 2023.

My inclination as a Mailman core developer is not to participate
actively in development of NNTP support in Mailman for Python 3.13+
unless we see an outpouring of support from site admins.  However, I
would be happy to answer questions and work on Mailman-side issues
that are blocking or inconvenient for the NNTP work.  Mark and
Abhilash would undoubtedly contribute as well, on a time-available
basis.

 >   I certainly would love to build an alternative Mailman Debian
 >   package that would be more up-to-date, but I don't want
 >   to do it on my own.

Debian and Python are compatible free software; just take the existing
package metadata, in a recent Mailman (presumably the most recent
release) drop in the most recent nntplib, and change all the import
statements.  mailman/src/mailman/mta/nntplib.py seems like a plausible
location.  IWBNI you could keep all Mailmanisms out of nntplib
(because of the GPL) so any bugfixes or improvements could be
available to the Python community.

I think you could probably be up and running VERY quickly with that
approach.  Of course it wouldn't just slot into the next iteration of
Debian because they have stringent QA (or maybe that could go into
unstable?).  I'm pretty sure it would be useful right away to a whole
lot of people who are willing to use a PPA.

Regards,
Steve