[Mailman-Developers] Hi from a student interested in a GSoC project

[Barry Warsaw]

On Apr 10, 2013, at 11:05 AM, Elias Assarsson wrote:

>I do not know if it is a good idea but I am thinking that using Augeas
>http://augeas.net might be a way to handle the migration of configuration
>from one format to another.

Definitely investigate these tools, although my suspicion is that they won't
help, or at least won't help enough to make accepting a new dependency worth
it.

There are a few problems to consider:

 * MM2's configuration file is a Python file which really must be imported in
   order to get a valid set of values.  MM3's configuration file is a stack of
   .ini-style files.

 * There is not always a 1-to-1 correspondence between MM2 values and MM3
   values.  Some configurations have been merged, some removed, etc.  You will
   pretty much have to go through each set of MM2 variables and decide if and
   how to transform them into something meaningful for MM3.

 * The configuration files are only for system-wide settings.  We really also
   want to be able to upgrade MM2 lists to MM3 lists, and that involves
   unpickling the config.db state and again, mapping the MM2 variables to MM3
   variables, which are stored in a database.

 * What about importing archives?

There is some moderate beginnings in the 3.0 tree, but none of it is
functional in all likelihood.  Take a look at src/mailman/bin/export.py
and src/mailman/commands/cli_import.py.

Cheers,
-Barry