[Overload-sig] Gmane may be shutting down

[Barry Warsaw]

On Jul 28, 2016, at 03:20 PM, Donald Stufft wrote:

>I do believe this is the purpose of HyperKitty. Although from a quick
>clicking around on the Fedora HyperKitty instance it doesn’t actually let you
>reply via the web, the “Reply” button is just a mailto: link with the correct
>values filled out (including In-Reply-To and such). This might be close
>enough to not matter? I’m not sure.

You can play with an instance of HK on lists.mailman3.org (there's also one on
python.org that Mark is building out).

Bottom line, yes, you can reply via the web to messages on the mailing list.
E.g.

https://lists.mailman3.org/archives/list/mailman-users@mailman3.org/thread/XM6XAOXUAXOKTSL4OBLHFTKVVJBG2TIP/

Note the "Use email software" button which provides the mailto:, however just
filling out the form and hitting Send will post it back to the mailing list
via internal REST APIs, so no MUA is needed.

Note however that logging into HK (and Postorius) is going to change soon.
We've been relying on Mozilla's Persona project to do logins because it's just
about perfect for Mailman, but Mozilla is shutting down that service, and
while the code is open source, it's very unlikely anyone is going to continue
to run a Persona instance.

Dan Callahan from Mozilla demoed a much simpler replacement at PyconUS 2016,
which could fill the same purpose, but I haven't heard anything more about
that in a long while, so it's not a viable option.

Meaning, for *right* now, Google or Facebook logins will be needed, but IIUC,
our wonderful HK/Postorius developers are working on integrating
django-social-auth which is more or less the norm for logging into a Django
site.  Ideally of course, if/when python.org gets SSO, we could use that too.

That's all in addition to the two integration points I mentioned early.  Way
back in the day, I prototyped a NNTP/Mailman bridge using Twisted and it
worked pretty well.  Given that MM3 today has a very robust REST API, and HK
has a very nice web ui, I think something Gmane-lite-like could be done with a
reasonable amount of effort.  It would be fairly siloed, in that the only
lists available from the NNTP server would be those vended by MM3 on that
site, but I think that's good enough.  NNTP does have ways to propagate
mailing lists, so once you had an NNTP interface, it probably wouldn't be
difficult to federate them somehow.

MM3 also has a very flexible "archiver" interface, which is where I think an
NNTP ui would fit in.  We also have a GSoC student doing excellent work on a
pubsub archiver which just about any external system could be connected to.
So even if (as I'm sure we all hope) Lars finds a way to continue Gmane going,
these APIs would serve as a better way to get messages into and out of a
Mailman 3 mailing list.

Cheers,
-Barry