Status update on mailman3 rollout
tldr; Good news - I think it's time to plan moving to the new mailing list software.
Mailman3 is up and operating at lists.inkscape.org, including imports of our list archives, current as of yesterday. All major issues have been resolved, and remaining work is just cosmetics.
While we're not quite to 100% yet I wanted to give the board a summary of what's been done and what's to come. You can take a look here:
First, the packaging, configuration, and deployment of mailman3 and its dependencies has been scripted in Ansible. This is now quite solid. Ian has been moving mountains to make this work smoothly..
Second is the mailing list configs. This is a one-time step, but I've scripted this too, using mailman3's REST api. We'll eventually need moderators identified for each list to handle spam and list admin requests but I can handle this initially.
Third, I've closed some lists that aren't going to be migrated. I haven't closed the inkscape-user-{LN}@ lists yet, but let them know we'll be merging them into inkscape-user@ going forward since their traffic has been negligible the past few years.
Fourth, the list archives. The SF archives didn't import cleanly at first, but I've patched hyperkitty's importer and dealt with each of the problems, and they're importing cleanly now. I'll do a new import once we're ready to cut over officially. SF munges the email addresses, which is why the gravatars aren't showing up correctly. It should be possible to un-munge at least the more frequent posters.
There are some other cosmetic bits to polish up the UI; this is all stuff that can be done post-rollout; I'll work on them as I have time, for now.
The main still-missing piece is a backup solution. This isn't critical to do pre-release, but it is the topmost item in the todo list.
The "rollout" of the new lists will be as simple as just asking people to sign up for the new lists and stop posting things on the old one. I'll do a fresh reimport of the archives at the time the email goes out.
People will need to re-subscribe, since SourceForge does not provide subscription lists any more.
Because of that, I'll send out a notice to each of the lists summarizing the changeover. I'll do that a week or two before the switch.
And before that (probably in a few days) I'll send out a summary to the inkscape-devel@ list similar to this one, that describes the technicals, so the development team knows what's happening.
Meanwhile, let me know if there are any questions, or issues you want to see addressed before we move forward. Otherwise, please look forward to our spiffy new mailing list software. :-)
Bryce
Thanks Bryce (and Ian) for moving mountains to get this done.
I've been watching the ansible builds and all the issues you guys have had to deal with, and it's really great to see the hard work pay off.
I'm hoping that as part of the role out, we can offer up our ansible playbook to other projects in the SFC and wider open source world. Very few projects have managed to get mailman3 setups, never mind reproducible ones. Well done!
The "rollout" of the new lists will be as simple as just asking people
I think the best roll out is a final shutdown message including links of where to go to sign up to the new replacement list, followed by changing the mailman2 settings in sourceforge to disallow further posting. We can start this with the board list which should be moved right away.
People will need to re-subscribe, since SourceForge does not provide subscription lists any more.
We may have lists of email addresses used for voting.
Thanks again for the amazing work!
Best Regards, Martin Owens
On Mon, Apr 22, 2019 at 01:22:17PM -0400, doctormo@...23... wrote:
Thanks Bryce (and Ian) for moving mountains to get this done.
I've been watching the ansible builds and all the issues you guys have had to deal with, and it's really great to see the hard work pay off.
The "rollout" of the new lists will be as simple as just asking people
I think the best roll out is a final shutdown message including links of where to go to sign up to the new replacement list, followed by changing the mailman2 settings in sourceforge to disallow further posting. We can start this with the board list which should be moved right away.
Actually, the process is fully scripted to do all the lists simultaneously, so it's easiest if we do them all at once. There's really only 6 lists being migrated (and 2 new lists).
People will need to re-subscribe, since SourceForge does not provide subscription lists any more.
We may have lists of email addresses used for voting.
I guess the main question here is whether we should auto-subscribe people, or if it's better to just let them sign up themselves. The downside for the latter is we'll probably end up with a smaller number of participants in the lists, but it will make the transition simpler on our end. A lot of people are pretty inactive on the lists so it may not be a bad thing to trim.
Interested in hearing other people's opinions though.
Thanks again for the amazing work!
I'm hoping that as part of the role out, we can offer up our ansible playbook to other projects in the SFC and wider open source world. Very few projects have managed to get mailman3 setups, never mind reproducible ones. Well done!
Initially I had agreed, but having gone through this process there's a lot of stuff that is particular to the host and distro version, that may make the playbook of use only as a reference. Generalizing it to suit other projects would take a bit of effort that I'm not sure has a high enough return value. Also, Recena had some concerns about making infrastructure configurations too public, for security reasons. So, I don't think publicizing this playbook is worth doing. But we could certainly share it project-to-project if there are specific people interested.
Bryce
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Bryce Harrington