Re: RFC: Hosting mailing lists of 3rd party projects

On Fri, Feb 25, 2011 at 04:27, Marc G. Fournier <scrappy(at)hub(dot)org> wrote:
> On Fri, 25 Feb 2011, Alvaro Herrera wrote:
>
>> Excerpts from Josh Berkus's message of jue feb 24 21:53:35 -0300 2011:
>>
>>> Personally, I think that if we're going to create additional project
>>> lists, we should launch a mailman instance instead of adding them to
>>> majordomo.  That way we can spread admin duties around, since we have a
>>> bunch of people who know mailman, and only one who understands majordomo.
>>
>> Managing a single set of archive files is already enough trouble.
>>
>> ... hey, but then, I think Mailman has an option to not do the pipermail
>> stuff and just stash the archives in mboxes just like Majordomo.  That
>> would let us handle both things together.  If that really works, maybe
>> the archive part wouldn't be that problematic after all.  (But I'm not
>> gonna moderate any Mailman crap.)
>
> My experience with Mailman is exactly that also ... it is great for the end
> user, but crap from an admin side fo things, especially if you want to do
> sstuff from the command line ...

To be honest, I find both mailman and majordomo2 to be very
user-unfriendly towards end users. Mailman sucking slightly less, but
still definitely sucking.

Mailman has much less sucky web interface, but a much more sucky mail
interface. I assume it's the sucky mail interface that makes you
(alvaro) say you won't moderate it?

AFAICT, that's workflow dependent really - I wouldn't touch the mj2
moderation stuff because it was horribly annoying, and would only do
the mailman moderation if forced to. Prior, that is, to developing an
actual android app to make the process acceptable *to me*. At which
point it's equally acceptable for mj2 and for mailman, except
everything is a lot slower for mj2 (because it's built off the web
interface, and the mj2 web interface is crap)

You can do reasonable stuff from the commandline in mailman as well,
but it's ugly and not necessarily well documented. OTOH, *all* of
majordomo2 is badly documented, AFAIK.

I don't think that would make a big difference.

What I am more worried about is that there seems to be no upstream
maintenance of mj2. I mean, their website hasn't been touched in more
than 10 years! And given the *huge* security hole that was found in it
recently (taht AFAIK was patched manually by Marc?), it's rather
obvious there is no maintenance. And that worries me a lot.

Mailman certainly has it's own share of issues with that. It seems
that the legendary mailman3 is actually going to get beaten to the
punch by Duke Nukem Forever, which says something.. But the larger
linux distributions (fedora, debian etc) at least seem to be doing
active work on maintaining the version they ship. Which makes me feel
a lot more comfortable with that product.

Do we really know the system well enough to be comfortable maintaining
*all* of it? Or is there actually some top secret upstream
maintainenance that just missed a *huge* security hole for 10 years?

--
 Magnus Hagander
 Me: http://www.hagander.net/
 Work: http://www.redpill-linpro.com/