[Mailman-Developers] before next release: disable backscatter indefault installation

[Jo Rhett]

Cristóbal Palmer wrote:
> So far I see documentation and some good scripts for fixing problems
> on existing systems coming out of this conversation.

As per my original statement, that would be great.

> Please let's make
> improving that documentation and making 2.2 and 3.0 good by your
> standards a priority.

None of these are "my standards".  The standards expoused by the leading 
anti-spam groups are what we are talking about.

> Jo, would you please be willing to take the lead in improving this
> wiki page:
> >   http://wiki.list.org/display/SEC/Controlling+spam
> 
> since it looks rather stubbish? If you're willing to lead by example
> on the documentation and 2.2, your argument would likely come off a
> bit better.

I've written some points about what is not covered in that to the list. 
  The problem is that what I did on the mailman install I was 
responsible for was fairly hackish.  I can program in almost anything, 
but Python is not my strong point and the Python.org style used in 
Mailman even less so.  This makes my patches fairly hackish and probably 
not the best way to do things.  (more on this below)

> Now, if your goal is a public telling-off of the mailman
> team, I think you've already made that clear enough. Can we move on?

Never did, never was.  Have repeatedly asked that we move on ;-)

> This open source world is a group effort that runs largely
> on good will and sharing. Your currency here often isn't valid if it
> doesn't come with a smile.

For projects where I am asking something of them, my approach generally 
comes with a smile and a patch.  In fact, if you look at the sourceforge 
patch repository you'll find that my functionality requests *did* come 
with patches.

This situation is different, because the request is going the other way. 
Mailman sites have been asking abuse departments to ignore the 
backscatter and smile for far too many years.  The smiles have long 
since faded and most of us are frustrated with the situation.  I took on 
role of trying to push the developers to put something in place before 
we simply banned mailman within our networks.

There is nothing personal here.  It is entirely technical, and entirely 
goal oriented.  The difficult part is that none of us at that meeting or 
in any of the conversations I'd had with others since then are strong 
Python developers.

And in fact, if you look back at my submitted patches and comments on 
this list -- I have in all cases asked what changes would make the patch 
workable and acceptable for inclusion into the codebase, and received no 
responses to that.  So we have fairly apparent opinion that my patches 
aren't stylistically worth considering.  I'm not surprised, given that I 
don't personally grok the Python.org style.  I'm not offended, just 
aware that my patches are unlikely to be useful in this effort.

-- 
Jo Rhett
Net Consonance ... net philanthropy, open source and other randomness