Hi all,
I've been putting off upgrading the mailing list server that hosts the
list version of this newsgroup for far too long, enough that it's blocking
a couple of needed major operating system upgrades that will also affect
the infrastructure for running this group. I'm hoping to finally tackle
that this weekend.
Unfortunately (and this is why it's taken so long), this requires a major change to the mailing list software from Mailman 2 to Mailman 3. The old software is end of life and no longer supported, and Mailman 3 is
substantially different, mostly in ways that I'm not that excited about.
I did some research into possible alternatives, and this still seems like
the best approach that doesn't require I put more effort into this than I
have readily available, but there will be a few annoyances.
The main annoying changes are:
* The archives are... weird. They're a bit more like a message board than
a mailing list archive, they don't use a fixed-width font (although I
will look again if that's configurable once I get the migration done and
can upgrade to the latest version), and there are upvotes and downvotes
and other things like that which seem rather pointless to me but that
don't seem to be configurable. All of the archives prior to this
cutover will also continue to be available in the old format, but going
forward new messages will be only archived in the new system (called
Hyperkitty) because the old stuff has to go away since it requires an
unsupported version of Python. The new archive does offer an mbox
download of messages, so at least in theory you can still download the
message and view it in a regular mail client, and of course the regular
mailing list function of sending you the messages will work as always.
* The new web site interface really wants you to create an account to use
it. I would rather that you not have to do that, and I definitely don't
want to have even hashed versions of any important passwords, so if you
create an account, please use some password you don't use anywhere else.
You can still subscribe to the list without creating an account, but
unsubscribing from the list without creating an account can only be done
via email. I think this is a poor design choice, but it doesn't appear
to be configurable. You can always mail
[email protected] to
unsubscribe (after the cutover) without having to create an account, or
just mail me directly if all else fails and I'll try to find your
address and remove it.
I will also have to do some major surgery to make the integration with the newsgroup work properly. I think I've figured out how to do that;
hopefully it will work.
I'm planning on doing this upgrade during this weekend. During that time period there will be a lot of outages, a lot of software in motion, and probably a few bugs and unforseen problems. Apologies in advance for the disruption, and make sure you keep anything you're posting over the
weekend so that you can resend it if needed. I will send the all-clear
when I think everything is working.
--
Russ Allbery (
[email protected]) <
https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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