[Mailman-Users] The last release from the GNU Mailman project

[Mark Sapiro]

On 2/28/20 6:17 AM, Jim Popovitch via Mailman-Users wrote:
> On Fri, 2020-02-28 at 19:52 +0900, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
>> Brian Carpenter writes:
>>
>>  > I have hired a professional PHP developer to begin work on a new 
>>  > admin/forum interface for Mailman 3.
>>
>> Too bad.  I really sympathize with your goals but am unlikely to be
>> able to contribute directly to implementation (assuming an eventual
>> open-sourcing).  Never learned PHP, not going to do it anytime soon.
> 
> Stephen, It's difficult for me to parse your thought process on this.
> Why do you say "Too bad" about someone wanting to improve something that
> you admit you want no part of?


Well, Steve channeled me earlier, so I'll return the favor. I think
Steve is saying "Too bad" he is only talking about the choice of PHP as
a platform rather than Python. We absolutely encourage people to develop
alternatives to Postorius and HyperKitty for archiving and web
management of Mailman. I think all Steve is saying is he could be more
helpful with Python as opposed to PHP.

See this paragraph:

>> That's OK, the point of REST is so *you* *can* do that.  I can only
>> speak for myself, but we can help to some extent on the Python side of
>> the REST interface.



> Who is this "we", you referenced them a few times in this email.


See the initial paragraph in the Acknowledgements section at
<https://www.list.org/>.



> I'm fairly confident in saying that Mark has said (repeatedly now) that
> there will never ever ever ever ever be another Mailman2 release beyond
> v2.1.30.  Stephen, why do you say there will be? Do you have the project
> authority to make that statement?  Who do I beleive?


Actually, I have said there will not be another release from the GNU
Mailman project. That does not preclude anyone from forking that project
from Launchpad and doing whatever with it.

I personally am not interested in porting Mailman 2 to Python 3. That's
already been done. The result, with a real backend database and some
extensions such as the concept of "user" that doesn't exist in MM 2, is
Mailman 3 core.


> What I'm reading between the lines is that
> nothing but Django was considered for MM3 (by "we") and everything else
> is inferior and not worth the time.  I'd love to be wrong on that.


The web based archiving and list management we distribute are based on
Django because that's how the people who developed those things wanted
to do it.

The whole point of Mailman 3 is all that stuff is separate from the core
engine and communicates with core via a REST API, so there can be lots
of different web management UIs. We knew if we released Mailman 3 core
only without a web UI for list management and archive access, no one
would use it, so we needed those things and the people who were willing
to implement them built what we have.

We certainly hoped that there would be people like Brian implementing
alternatives and we're glad to see it.

>> Agreed.  I didn't even know bounce processing wasn't working until
>> this summer (my production lists are all in-house to personal
>> acquaintances to same-university addresses -- if mail isn't flowing to
>> somebody, it's not going to anybody, even Mailman!)
> 
> MM3 has been on python.org for a while, was it not noticed there either?


Of course. We began discussing this almost 3 years ago
<https://gitlab.com/mailman/mailman/issues/343#note_31870366>. The
implementation was mostly done last year by a GSOC student.

We are a small project. We have very few people working on Mailman on a
regular basis, and everyone is a volunteer, no one is paid. If you want
things to happen faster, please contribute.

-- 
Mark Sapiro <mark at msapiro.net>        The highway is for gamblers,
San Francisco Bay Area, California    better use your sense - B. Dylan