Re: Mailing Lists: Mailman 2 -> Mailman 3, or something different? [was some other subject]

Quoting Ron / BCLUG ([email protected]):

> I'm at this stage - Python2 was deprecated years ago and is not part
> of default installs on my systems.

Quite so.  Which means that its relatively modest list of dependencies,
including some Python support libs, is going to gradually become a
greater concern, not to mention the MLM itself, which may not get fixes.

> Mailman2 works, but the web interface it hideous, and it too is
> deprecated (depends on Python2).
> 
> Looking at Mailman3's web interface, it's quite nice.

Well, let's talk about that.

The Mailman2 Pipermail archiver is certainly stuck in 1998
aesthetically, and is more familiar than loved, but at least does one
thing (the essentials of a back-postings archive in browseable form) 
well enough.  Here you are at the entry:
http://linuxmafia.com/pipermail/conspire/

Very concise, selectable time chunks (increment size settable by the
listadmin, with monthly being most common, but quartery and yearly
are offered).  The selected time chunk can be sorted by date, thread,
subject, or author.  Mostly one goes for date, and thus:
http://linuxmafia.com/pipermail/conspire/2024-February/date.html

Again, concise, uncluttered.  The available messages in the time chunk
(here, a month) are in order, one per line, showing subject + author
name.  Drill down to an individual message, and:
http://linuxmafia.com/pipermail/conspire/2024-February/012599.html

Grouped together, subjec, then author name _with_ posting e-mail
address, then date in a reasonable date/time formatThe selected time
chunk can be sorted by date, thread, subject, or author.  Mostly one
goes for date, and thus:
http://linuxmafia.com/pipermail/conspire/2024-February/date.html

Again, concise, uncluttered.  The available messages in the time chunk
(here, a month) are in order, one per line, showing subject + author
name.  Drill down to an individual message, and:
http://linuxmafia.com/pipermail/conspire/2024-February/012599.html

Grouped together, subject, then author name _with_ posting e-mail
address, then date in a reasonable date/time format.
A couple of archive-browsing controls, then a ruled line, then
the plaintext rendition of the message, no funny stuff.

I certainly never loved pipermail on either an aesthetic or 
organisational level, but it certainly does the assigned job.


Let's call up an example of Mailman3's equivalent, HyperKitty:
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/[email protected]/

Gods, what a mess.  "Most Popular" this, "Recently Active" that;
it's all over the place.  And the Most Active Posters have pictograms,
and you get to know how many posts each has made, because that's 
_certainly_ what I most need to know when I visit a mailing list
archiver.  A bunch of functions that have _nothing_ to do with the
archiver are crammed in, such as "Manage this list", "Sign in", "sign
up", "start a new thread", and "manage subscription".  

Hey, wait, I just wanted to browse an archive! What's all this other
mishegoss?  Tearing my eyes away, I see the list of years on the left,
with the latest year broken out by month.  So, within 2024, I pick
February:
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/[email protected]/2024/2/

Do I have anything like pipermail's concise list of messages in order,
one per line?  Do I get to pick among four sorting criteria?  Nope and
nope.  For each message, I get:
1. subject line
2. author name, but _not posting e-mail address_.  
3. The first five lines of body text, then "Show More".
4. Off to the right, nope, not a datestamp, but rather an
   offset time delta from _you_, because precious you are the measure of
   all things.  Examples:

   20 minutes  and
   8 hours, 26 minutes

5. A pictogram and count that I guess is number of replies or something.
6. A pictogram and count that.. not sure.  How many people quoted?
7. "likes"
8. "dislikes"

So, really, now mailing list archives are all about who's thumbs-up-ing
and thumbs-down-ing stored past messages?

Click on the most-recent mesage to see detail:
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/[email protected]/thread/GU2CGYLBCWZOGZIUSAFHGZ7KHS3MDOX4/

Author's name is shown -- and a photo, whee!  But no e-mail address.
Which, sorry, utterly unacceptable.  Part of the purpose of a mailing
list archive is to enable contact to authors.

Also the subject header, and another slightly wacky implementation of
the date, one where (at least) it's not just a time-offset delta, but
the UTC offset / timezone is not disclosed!

So, basically, we're not cleared to be told the author's e-mail address
or timezone.  Maybe it's classified top secret?

Otherwise, in other respects, I don't hate the per-message page display
format.  Well, actually, there's one more thing I loathe:  Quoted lines
(the ones indicted with the ">" quotation prefix) get suppressed and
instead you get a Web control to optionally show them.

Fsck that.  Show the goddamned message, and don't play "I'm going to
cleverly transform the content" games.  Sheesh.

So, well, maybe I do hate the per-message page display format a bit.


What software is required for this?  Just Python3, right?  No, of course
not!  Both the HyperKitty archiver and the Postorius Web-interface for
commands to the MLM are built atop the Django framework, which in _turn_
is built atop Python3.  A whole big language framework.

And is the message store back-ended into a bog-standard cumulative mbox
file, with the archiver generating HTML and TXT archives from that?  Of
course not.  No, that would be too simple.  Mailman3 back-ends
everything into SQLite by defaut, or at your option other SQL databases
such as MySQL or PostgreSQL -- but not _just_ a SQL database, of which
you're suddenly a DBA.  Nope, it's abstracted via a Object Relational
Mapper called SQLAlchemy.  And _also_, you're going to have to hit the
books to learn all about a "database migration tool" (some sort of
parser) called Alembic, that is required for anything that rejigers the
database schema if you change anything.


I have a concise word for all of this.  It's "no".


> Then, today, I heard something on a Linux Unplugged podcast episode
> - a *rumour* - that Linux Foundation had attempted to move to
> Mailman3 in 2017, reverted, and is now considering moving all their
> mailing lists to Matrix.

I'd expect Linux Foundation to do something utterly bizarre and
dysfunctional, so I'm not disappointed.  "Hey, let's just toss the whole
idea of mailing lists and in fact of e-mail fundamentally, and move
sideways to something utterly alien."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrix_(protocol)

> Is that the nail in the coffin for an already moribund tech (mailing lists)?

Always possible, though I won't think that just because someone has
glommed onto a New Shiny[tm].  Certainly, mailing list technology is
now antiquated and limited.  However, there are compensating advantages,
such as that the very limitations keep the stored data stable and 
protect continuity of knowledge.  The New Shinys[tm] have come and gone,
with each convulsion losing a big chunk of history that is not forward
migratable -- but the technical community's mailing lists, in many
cases, are continuous back to the 1990s.


> >And what do the RHAT IBMers use, these days?  And Rocky Linux?
> 
> I'm gonna guess that whatever it is, it isn't email-based.

Obviously I cannot see what RHAT/IBM uses for internal process
communication, but on the outside, there's a lot of Mailman 2.1.30.
https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo
(As mentioned above, Fedora Project uses Mailman3.)

Rocky Linux is Mailman3.
https://lists.resf.org/mailman3/lists/

> There have been issues with Ottawa LUG's mailing list, which uses
> mlmmj, but I can't speak to whether it's from mis-configuration or
> the software itself.

Ah, thanks for that.

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