Upgrade of alioth-lists to bookworm tomorrow, and future plans

[Dominic Hargreaves via announce]

Hi list owners!

This is the first of an occasional series of messages from your site
admins, after more than 6(!) years[1] of running alioth-lists.debian.net
on Mailman 2.

We need to upgrade the system running alioth-lists very soon, since it
will be out of LTS support at the end of June[2]. There will be therefore
an outage window *tomorrow* (2024-06-05) from 6pm UK time (17:00 UTC)
as we upgrade from buster to bullseye, the last version of Debian we
can reasonably run Mailman 2 on.

We expect small periods of disruption as we upgrade the underlying OS and
tools, but the mailman software itself should not change.

More broadly, we hope to continue to offer this service for the foreseeable
future, as it continues to show sustained use (and even the occasional new
list request). We plan to migrate from mailman 2 to mailman 3 in the
coming year to ensure long-term viability, and certainly well before
bullseye is out of support.

It would be helpful at this stage to take stock of current use, and
identify lists which might no longer be needed. To that end, please do
let us know if there are such lists or if you have other thoughts.

Also let us know if you would be interested in helping plan and execute
the mailman 3 migration. Dominic has some experience of doing this, but
there are definitely some challenges to overcome (not least archive URL
stability).

Cheers
your admins (Dominic, Alex and Bernhard)

[1] <https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2018/01/msg00003.html>
[2] <https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2024/05/msg00002.html>