[Mailman-Developers] Betas coming soon

[Barry A. Warsaw]

Folks,

Okay, I think I solved the last major hurdle before I can start
releasing the new betas.  Mailman should now lazily update it's old
pending requests "database" to the new style external requests.db
file.  Wasn't as hard as I thought it would be.

You will still have to be careful when upgrading from 1.1/1.0 to the
new version.  Please read/debug my recommendations in the UPGRADING
file for details (after I check it in).

While I'm pretty sure upgrading will work, I really need feedback from
you beta testers.  For now, I'd say you should be careful upgrading
any operational site, but on the other hand I want to encourage you to
test this stuff as much as possible.  All feedback is welcome.

Now, my questions.

1) Notice I haven't said "upgrade to 1.2" because I'm going to call
   the new release 2.0.  While there aren't that many outwardly
   visible differences, there are enough architectural and schema
   changes, that I believe a 2.0 label is warranted.  Plus, I want to
   give a stronger indication that the changes may be, er,
   significant.

   This means that if I really screw up 2.0, I can get a few 2.x bug
   patches out in quick succession.  This also means that the i18n'd
   Mailman will likely be called 3.0.  What's in a number anyway? :)

1) I've thought about being really parental about the upgrade, by
   essentially forcing people to read the UPGRADING file before "make"
   will succeed.  I think I have a trick that will work, but I'm not
   sure it's a good idea.  On the one hand it /might/ (only might)
   save lazy or novice upgraders some headaches by forcing them to
   read the manual first.

   One the other hand, it'll be really annoying either to those who
   are doing a fresh install, or who are upgrading but know what
   they're doing.  So, do you think it would be a good idea to force
   everyone to read UPGRADING before "make" succeeds?

Watch for the final round of checkins some time (hopefully) this week.
After that I'll spin the 2.0beta1 tarball.  I'm pretty sure the
current CVS snapshot is very close, modulo updating the docs.  I still
need to get through the email backlog (sigh) and the Jitterbug
database, but I can do that while the betas are out on the street.

Cheers,
-Barry