majordomo/majorcool development

What is the future of majordomo and majorcool?


We've used majordomo (now 1.94.5) and majorcool (now 1.3.2) for ten years, 
and they have served us reasonably well.  Recently I needed to do a little 
tinkering, and came across some issues which, if addressed properly, 
could be useful to other sites.

But both majordomo and majorcool seem stuck.  (There was once a plan to do 
a big "Majordomo 2", but that seemed to get stuck around the year 2000.)

Both have much to offer, especially in combination.  But both are hampered 
by (seeming) complete lack of active development.



How realistic would it be for us (the keen readers here) to begin to do a 
little, small-scale, development work on good old Majordomo-1 and 
Majorcool?  (BTW, if approved, I would volunteer to do what I could.)

The things I would particularly like to address are:
  1. Packaging/installation
  2. Configuration file (single site, multiple domain)
  3. Rationalisation of some poor Majordomo/Majorcool interfaces
  4. Perhaps combine (to emphasise that this is a single application
     with two interfaces)

Perhaps others, too, have a wish-list.

My particular emphasis would be on small-scale things that we could get 
quickly coded and released. And then to continue, small-scale, with a 
"release early, release often" practice.  (Mj2 seemed to get bogged down 
because it was too hugely different from Mj1.  And I notice that Mailman 
development seems to be similarly sluggish.)



Would the licensing allow others (such as us) to adopt the code, adjust 
it, and then re-release it?

If not, could the current licence holders make it so?  Perhaps they could 
release it a known open-source licence, such as GPL, or Perl-Artistic, 
Apache, etc.

Would we be OK to move development to (say) Sourceforge or similar?

Etc.

(Just some thoughts for the holiday season...)



-- 

:  David Lee                                I.T. Service          :
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:  UNIX Team Leader                         Durham University     :
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