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

[Ron / BCLUG]

Rick,

Thank you - that was a really informative post.

I'm going to throw some quick thoughts out in response - first 
impressions, really.

Admittedly, it doesn't do your comprehensive comment justice.


Rick Moen wrote on 2024-02-20 01:15:

> Let's call up an example of Mailman3's equivalent, HyperKitty:
> https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@lists.fedoraproject.org/
> 
> 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".

My first impression was "yikes" and the "Activity Summary" threw me off 
too - yuck.

Clicking around a bit though, and I wasn't able to get that back unless 
I manually edited the URL.

So, "Activity Summary" and "Most Active Posters" -- they're not on every 
page, just a general landing page.

I can see that info being of some value, as long as it's *not* in my 
face every page load.



> 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/devel@lists.fedoraproject.org/2024/2/
> 
> Do I have anything like pipermail's concise list of messages in order,
> one per line?

Honestly, I do like a few lines of preview of the message.

I've had to go through archives looking for that one post that mentioned 
something and this looks like an easier way to do that.


> Do I get to pick among four sorting criteria?

Missing feature that ought to be there, agreed.


> Nope and
> nope.  For each message, I get:
> 1. subject line
> 2. author name, but_not posting e-mail address_.

I can see the hiding of email addresses being a feature I'd like.

Mailman2 allows the archives to be hidden from non-subscribers.  If I 
were signed in, I wonder if I'd have access to the email addresses?


> 3. The first five lines of body text, then "Show More".

I *like* that.

The first message's "View More" for February 2024 reveals hundreds of 
lines of package info.

I absolutely do not want to see that (unless it's something I'm 
specifically looking for).


> 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

Oh, what the holy hell is that?

Makes sense for busy lists (maybe), but look back at messages from 
December 2014, and I'm seeing:

 > "5 months, 4 weeks"

(wut? How about 6 months? And, the date is 2009-07-01, so how many 
years?  Why is "Outage Notification - 2009-07-01 under 2014 December?)


 > "2 years, 1 month"

(again, this is for 2014 December - "2 years"?!?

And so on.

I wonder if switching Mailman2 to Mailman3 mangled some dates?




> 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?

I think it's number of participants & number of comments.


> 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?

My first impression was, "meh", but there are lists with quite a few 
posts that could / should be down-voted to oblivion as they don't 
contribute.

But who's going to the *web page* to do that? It's *email*.




> Click on the most-recent mesage to see detail:
> https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@lists.fedoraproject.org/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.

Again, I'm okay with hiding / obfuscating email addresses with the 
assumption they're available to list members.

Photos are unnecessary but... better than emoji!



> 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!

I'm gonna assume it's based off the date info from the browser. Pretty 
sure email will also show the date & time sent according to my TZ.


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

I'm certain I've seen Mailman2 list archives where emails are 
obfuscated, no?  Am I thinking of some Google abomination of forum / 
support page?



> 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.

I was mostly on board with this until the first message I expanded was a 
list of several lines of info for ... every package on somebody's system?

I did not like that.

Also, when searching archives in the past, one message per page, with 
multiple screens of quoted text... I'm coming around to this technique.



> 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.

Yeah, excellent point.

I just checked: `apt show python3-django-hyperkitty` has 
"Installed-Size: 9,924 kB".  Not as bad as expected.




> 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.

As much as I despise mbox, I'm kinda torn on this. There's probably 
already some SQL server on any box that would be hosting this, so... yay 
no mbox files?


I've switched my dovecot to Maildir:LAYOUT=fs and my Thunderbird to use 
Maildir locally after doing a migration and finding a bunch of mangled 
messages in mbox format.




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

I like that; very concise!




>> 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)

Yeah, I was surprised. I was not shocked.



>> 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.

If anyone's gonna abandon mailing lists, I do wish they'd consider XMPP 
/ Jabber.

But everywhere - tech sites, non-tech sites, it's almost always "Join 
our Discord".   le sigh



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

Makes sense, having started in December 2020.



Back to Mailman3 - I can see some advantages to the web archive, in 
fact, I think I prefer it overall.

Most users never encounter the web version except to sign up, so moot 
point for most users.


But I just don't want to deal with hyper kitties and pistoriouses and 
djangos and all these new terms. (Am I getting old?)


rb