[Mailman-Developers] Mailman-Developers Digest, Vol 286, Issue 10

[Chris Cargile]

On the matter of communications, I might hope to take yet a moment to
address my goals, motivations, and expectations for contributing to the
quite-worthy, well-thought-out and respectable mailman3 *team* effort and
re-establish what might be already seemingly clear to some...I am a
new-comer to the software development field but am not clueless as to the
notion that everybody's style doesn't always immediately mesh up
automatically but rest assured that I'll try to get to speed and make sure
I don't re-address anything beyond reason (my goal for restatement is an
attempt at allowing for the opportunity to address any misconceived notions
I have so I can get confirmation that I understood correctly and move on
quickly).  As a contributor in an environment where everybody's diverse
experiences are valuable to the group effort, the environment for me will
present a much-welcomed chance to draw on such experiences where I am
hoping to give as much as I could draw and hope your advice and direction
will be shared often to help achieve this!

To summarize my background and experience for all with an interested, I
began school to be in business, finishing there in 2006 with a BS in
Business to become a federally-serving private sector employee working in
IT, but realized after just a few short years in that role that the heart
of our service - computers - was not only my area of passion but also
something I could see myself doing for the longer-term of a career perhaps.
In my first position as a 'business person' I built a website (as a
separate contract-pay assignment), put my web development experience to
work growing in a non-profit for my career sector, and started my own sites
and building web applications, to lead me to my current position as a
continuing student (in CS,software) where I supposed I am being convinced
of my grad school/research ideals but am retaining the goal of
philanthropic contribution.  I did have the chance to participate in some
local STEM initiatives which was pretty cool (involving python programming
with middle- and high-school children, locally).

I have had the opportunity of working of course with people whose styles
meshed easily and some where it was more difficult, but I would like to
assert that I'm very enthusiastic about being on-board here with all of you
and would like to attend any meetings for general discussion or encourage
reaching out if you see me poking around the #mailman chat, you want to set
up a google hangout to discuss mailman, etc (by default, email is perfectly
adequate, if you prefer that only).

The more quickly I can come to fitting in and sharing the heavy-lifting,
the better for all (and the outcome for mailman, I hope)

Please friend me, follow me, ask about my experiences, or ask to see more
if you don't find what out you'd like to know about me through at my site
pages: chriscargile.com, chriscargile.com/portfolio

When we know whether the networking supports it, I would find it great to
meet for a video chat or streamcast from the pysprint, if you're
interested?

I am working on the virtual-machine idea, in the meantime, if anyone wants
a status update on it, sometime soon

R/Chris

On Thu, Feb 28, 2013 at 6:00 AM, <mailman-developers-request at python.org>wrote:

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> Today's Topics:
>
>    1. background on maintaining the documentation (was RE:
>       Mailman-Developers Digest, Vol 286, Issue 9) (Chris Cargile)
>    2. Re: background on maintaining the documentation (was RE:
>       Mailman-Developers Digest, Vol 286, Issue 9) (Terri Oda)
>    3. Re: background on maintaining the documentation (was RE:
>       Mailman-Developers Digest, Vol 286, Issue 9) (Barry Warsaw)
>    4. Re: Mailman-Developers Digest, Vol 286, Issue 7 (Barry Warsaw)
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Wed, 27 Feb 2013 14:33:48 -0500
> From: Chris Cargile <follybeachris at gmail.com>
> To: mailman-developers at python.org
> Subject: [Mailman-Developers] background on maintaining the
>         documentation (was RE: Mailman-Developers Digest, Vol 286, Issue 9)
> Message-ID:
>         <CAHxCx-sJ_=3D=
> gZMV_hdRTdTz+RHMW_iCqRHYF+g2A+G3_mj5Q at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> thanks guys - that helps me get going with things..like documentation
> probably should, huh? :)
>
> >If there is any functionality that you are wondering about, by all means
> >provide a link to an example of its usage and I'll try and give an opinion
> on
> >whether it will be easily supported or not. Generally, the border between
> >Wiki and CMS territory is vague (a Wiki is a form of CMS, after all) and
> it
> >can be quite straightforward to add functionality regarded as CMS-specific
> to
> >Moin.
> >Paul
>
> the Moin system will get us away from the Atlassian licensing hassle AND
> would tie in great for enabling a new website for the MM3 release, - it
> would be cool, IMO, if we got to explore the RSS feature's (
> http://moinmo.in/MoinMoinSyndication) working since we could generate
> recent changes outputting onto a feed, and from there, either give the RSS
> page some nice CSS or display the feed on the new site main-page if it was
> being served up separately from the moin system.  I also checked using the
> w3c validator and moin outputs its pages in valid-xhtml mark-up so that's
> good for accessibility, which seems like a good goal for Mailman too,
> seeing as its role is a communications medium
>
> so +++1 for the moin cms transfer (/RSS?) - I don't have much familiarity
> with moin blogspaces, but it'll work fine I bet
>
> >>So I interpret your question as being whether the documentation on the
> Wiki is
> >>just a snapshot of some documentation maintained elsewhere or whether the
> >>work is being done on the Wiki itself.
>
> The documentation is maintained to some level in Atlassian,
> pythonhosted.org,
> and the bzr repos (, other places?) per package, so Terri explained that
> Atlassian is the main location for how-to's, admin guides, and GSOC stuff.
> Otherwise, for simplicity, the packages have docs and doctests, in the
> individual package themselves
>
>
> on Tue, 26 Feb 2013 10:38 Terri Oda wrote:
> > At minimum, I think it is important to get confirmation whether the
> > confluence snapshot (wiki.list.org) is just a snapshot and we can direct
> > our efforts at updating the documentation there? also, on that note, what
> > would be the sphinx documentation role in all this and/or how necessary
> is
> > it to understand that system?
>
> >>You can, in the case of errors, also submit
> >>merge requests to fix the documentation in the source tree.  At some
> >>point, I imagine Paul will tell us the migration is ready to go and
> >>we'll freeze the wiki, but for now go ahead and edit there.
>
> Would the merges accepted propogate document changes to the package repos
> or are we referring to a merge against a documents-repo that is somewhere I
> don't know of.  I'm still confused on where the sphinx documentation plays
> into it (is that maybe like building javadocs only, instead it does so for
> python, maybe)
>
> r/Chris
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 2
> Date: Wed, 27 Feb 2013 17:18:49 -0700
> From: Terri Oda <terri at zone12.com>
> To: Chris Cargile <follybeachris at gmail.com>,
>         mailman-developers at python.org
> Subject: Re: [Mailman-Developers] background on maintaining the
>         documentation (was RE: Mailman-Developers Digest, Vol 286, Issue 9)
> Message-ID: <512EA269.6020802 at zone12.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
>
>
> On 13-02-27 12:33 PM, Chris Cargile wrote:
> > the Moin system will get us away from the Atlassian licensing hassle
> > AND would tie in great for enabling a new website for the MM3 release,
> Um... Chris, you do realize that we're experience software developers
> working on a project under the banner of the free software foundation?
> We're reasonably familiar with licensing issues and how they relate to
> mailman!  The message you sent (which I've mostly snipped) is not only
> un-timely at this point so long after the decision about switching was
> made but also seems a little patronizing in context.
>
> > Would the merges accepted propogate document changes to the package
> > repos or are we referring to a merge against a documents-repo that is
> > somewhere I don't know of. I'm still confused on where the sphinx
> > documentation plays into it (is that maybe like building javadocs
> > only, instead it does so for python, maybe)
>
> There is a docs directory in each project.  There is no separate docs repo.
>
> Mailman's is here:
>
> https://bazaar.launchpad.net/~mailman-coders/mailman/3.0/files/head:/src/mailman/docs/
>
> Postorius' is here:
>
> https://bazaar.launchpad.net/~mailman-coders/postorius/trunk/files/head:/src/postorius/doc/
>
> and I don't have a link for Hyperkitty's handy but I'm sure you can find
> it yourself.
>
> And now my turn to border on patronizing:  My recommendation is that as
> a new contributor, you should really stick to editing the wiki until you
> have a sense of what you're doing and let the devs maintain the
> documentation for their own packages.
>
>   Terri
>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 3
> Date: Wed, 27 Feb 2013 22:59:40 -0500
> From: Barry Warsaw <barry at list.org>
> To: mailman-developers at python.org
> Subject: Re: [Mailman-Developers] background on maintaining the
>         documentation (was RE: Mailman-Developers Digest, Vol 286, Issue 9)
> Message-ID: <20130227225940.65ce4d94 at anarchist.wooz.org>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
>
> On Feb 27, 2013, at 02:33 PM, Chris Cargile wrote:
>
> >the Moin system will get us away from the Atlassian licensing hassle AND
> >would tie in great for enabling a new website for the MM3 release,
>
> I'm really hoping we can get onto Moin soon, not only for the above good
> reasons, but also because of the free software issue, and because -- while
> generous -- it's still a big hassle to deal with our Confluence hosting
> provider when problems come up.  I'm very confident we can find a
> Moin-based
> wiki a good home.
>
> >The documentation is maintained to some level in Atlassian,
> pythonhosted.org,
> >and the bzr repos (, other places?) per package, so Terri explained that
> >Atlassian is the main location for how-to's, admin guides, and GSOC stuff.
> >Otherwise, for simplicity, the packages have docs and doctests, in the
> >individual package themselves
>
> I'm a big fan of having as much documentation in the source repository as
> possible.  I love a good wiki, but everything needs gardening and
> documentation seems better suited for version control systems.  Not all
> documentation need be testable, but that which can be works great being
> part
> of the source tree.  (The current doctest suite is I think of mixed
> quality;
> some of the older doctests conflated too much bad-path testing which makes
> it
> more difficult to read as documentation.  I've been migrating much of that
> to
> unittests, in order to improve the readability and good-path flow of the
> documentation.)
>
> It's also much easier to review and merge documentation changes via our
> dvcs
> tools.
>
> One thing that's missing is better overview documentation.  That's long
> been
> on my list of things to improve.
>
> >Would the merges accepted propogate document changes to the package repos
> or
> >are we referring to a merge against a documents-repo that is somewhere I
> >don't know of.  I'm still confused on where the sphinx documentation plays
> >into it (is that maybe like building javadocs only, instead it does so for
> >python, maybe)
>
> The pythonhosted.org (formerly packages.python.org) documentation is
> generated
> from the source tree via `python setup.py build_sphinx`.  You can build it
> and
> view it locally the same way.  `python setup.py upload_docs` is what gets
> the
> new documentation uploaded, but I've just created a project on
> readthedocs.org
> so I think we should migrate there as our primary online documentation
> source.  The nice thing is that gets automatically updated when we push
> updates to lp:mailman (i.e. trunk).
>
> Cheers,
> -Barry
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 4
> Date: Wed, 27 Feb 2013 23:12:07 -0500
> From: Barry Warsaw <barry at list.org>
> To: mailman-developers at python.org
> Subject: Re: [Mailman-Developers] Mailman-Developers Digest, Vol 286,
>         Issue 7
> Message-ID: <20130227231207.1e281f5f at anarchist.wooz.org>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
>
> (I really should catch up on all the threads before I start responding.
>  Sigh,
> it's been a long day. ;)
>
> On Feb 26, 2013, at 10:38 AM, Terri Oda wrote:
>
> >Barry just uses the blog functionality as a news area; I'm guessing a
> "recent
> >news" page would probably suffice for this.  I expect we'll keep the
> >Confluence wiki around for a little while after the migration, but since
> it's
> >a minor hassle to get our license renewed, I expect it will lapse
> eventually.
>
> I mostly stopped blogging on Confluence, even for new releases, since it's
> actually kind of a pain.  I should blog more Mailman stuff on my own blog
> (www.wefearchange.org) and will definitely do so after Pycon.
>
> >I still have a todo list item reminding me that we'd like a new website
> for
> >Mailman 3.0's release (including cleaning up the myriad different docs
> >available for previous versions) so maybe at that point we'll go back to
> >using the front page for news updates.
>
> Of course, I'm +1 on a new website for MM3, and I'd *dearly* love to get
> rid
> of the ht2html based web site on www.list.org.  I bet Sphinx can give us
> something awesome, and beautifully themed to our new logo and color scheme.
>
> Cheers,
> -Barry
>
>
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> End of Mailman-Developers Digest, Vol 286, Issue 10
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