[Mailman-Developers] Rolling releases for Container Images and Funding Campaign for Mailman

[Abhilash Raj]

Hi Everyone,

As you all know I have been working on container images for Mailman 3.
We now have a new "rolling" tag for both mailman-core and
mailman-web images. These images have latest source installed
for every Mailman component. You can find more information about them 
on the website [3].

New images are available on quay.io and, moving forward, the rest of 
the image builds will also be moved to Quay[4][5].

These images are built using git-heads *only* if they are passing our
test suite and are re-generated weekly. You should be aware that while
all these components are tested with their individual test suites, their
combination might sometimes not be stable. This will get you
updates/bug-fixes much faster :)



As most of you already know, Mailman 3 is the new and improved version
with extra features, better security and much better architecture. We
released Mailman Suite 3.0 in April 2015 and have come a long ways since
then. Mailman Suite 3.1, release May 2016, was aimed to provide
feature-parity with Mailman 2.x series and we think we _almost_ hit that
goal.

Apart from no monthly password reminders, Mailman 3 has a much better
Administrator/User interface, REST API for scripting, a really awesome
archiver, support for multiple domains, support for external plugins,
support for SSO/social login and so much more!

I love working on Mailman and would enjoy being able to do so full time
for next 6-8 weeks. Mailman 3 is not very far from becoming the default
version everyone would use, but it still needs some work to get there. I
need help from you, the users of Mailman, to get us there. If you or
your organization would like to move to (or, already moved to) Mailman
3, I urge you to donate[1] to us.

There are options to donate using Credit Card, Paypal, Bitcoin, Wire
Transfer
(of any currency), Check and money order.

If this campaign succeeds, here is a road map of what I intend to get
done:

- Move Django apps(UI/Archiver) to Python 3 (or bilingual)
- Fork `mailman import` command to provide an upgrade path to Mailman
3.x from Mailman 2.x
- Fix MySQL compatibility in Core
- Changes in Postorius:
  - Add support for missing options that are already exposed in Core’s
    API
     - e.g. Support for setting templates
  - Find the commonly used options that are not exposed in Core, add
    them to Core's API and add to Postorius
  - Add Admin Dashboard project from GSoC 2014 (maybe?)
- Add better testing of container images and provide deployment
  instructions for Kubernetes & Docker Swarm
- Improve the container images to work with new micro-services
architecture,
  to achieve scaling and redundancy in services.
- Administrator/User documentation for Postorius & Mailman
- (optional) Fork [mmcli](https://github.com/rajeevs1992/mailmancli)
  project from Rajeev, fix if there is anything missing  and add it as
  an
  additional command line tool to work with Mailman Core. Maybe pull it
  under Mailman umbrella.

Except for these, if there is something more important that is
preventing the adoption of Mailman 3 from your end, we can discuss them.
I'd like to mention that I have been working on Mailman 3 for quite some
time now and I intend to implement every single item on the list. You
donations would help it get done much sooner, hopefully in time for 3.2
release schedule (at PyCon US 2018).


You can follow the progress of this campaign here[2].

[1]: https://my.fsf.org/civicrm/contribute/transact?reset=1&id=22
[2]: https://wiki.list.org/x/17892025
[3]: https://asynchronous.in/docker-mailman/#rolling-releases
[4]: https://quay.io/repository/maxking/mailman-web
[5]: https://quay.io/repository/maxking/mailman-core

-- 
  Abhilash Raj
  maxking at asynchronous.in