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

[Elias Assarsson]

Thanks for an informative answer!

2013-04-10 20:14, Barry Warsaw skrev:
> 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.
I am trying to find and understand the configuration files so that I 
know what that that needs to be migrated and to what form. Is the MM2 
configuration you refer to mainly Mailman/mm_cfg.py and MM3 
configuration files src/mailman/config/* and /src/mailman/<listname>/*?
>   * 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.
Given the two points above it seems that handling the migration from 
within Python is the best choice (rather than using Augeas which is C 
based or Config::Model which is Perl based). Obviously one wants to use 
whatever feature of Python that can ease the process. You seem to be 
using configparser in MM3. I dunno if there are any other Python tool 
one should look at in helping migration. Maybe one should investigate 
this further.
>   * What about importing archives?
I have tried to find information on how archives are stored in MM2 and 
MM3 but failed to find any. What is a good source to learn about this?
> 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.
So those are the files that are supposed to handle migration for which 
the project is to make them handle a complete migration from MM2 to MM3?

On another note I have been able to setup a web UI although it took far 
longer than 5 minutes as I struggled with problems due to having both 
Python 2.7 and 3.2 on my system.