Mailing list musings (was Re: Two naive questions)

[Christopher Faylor]

On Tue, Apr 21, 2020 at 12:33:59PM -0600, Brian Inglis wrote:
>On 2020-04-20 14:14, Christopher Faylor wrote:
>> On Mon, Apr 20, 2020 at 11:59:08AM -0600, Brian Inglis wrote:
>>> The new server ml archive does not seem to offer the metadata available on the
>>> previous server and archive, and that is true of most archives that do not allow
>>> replies: probably a good way to reduce space required by 50-90%, from what I can
>>> see.
>>> A subscribed user could provide you with the reply References header values.
>> This is a text cut and paste from https://cygwin.com/pipermail/cygwin/
>>     The Cygwin Archives
>>     You can get more information about this list.
>>     Archive 	View by: 	Downloadable version
>>     April 2020: 	[ Thread ] [ Subject ] [ Author ] [ Date ] 	[ Gzip'd Text 110 KB ]
>> Notice the "Gzip'd Text ..."?
>> That's the mbox formatted email archives.
>
>I imported them all into Thunderbird to be able to search locally, as all
>archive search tools seem to be worse than any of the search sites in
>determining relevance or providing *all* relevant results newest first, while
>the builtin tools allow searching on header field combos, and there is always
>grep/sed/awk thru the mozmsgs maildirs for the really fuzzy searches.
>
>Your previous reply was probably the best that can be done with pipermail
>archives on mailman 2.1, although I am surprised you did not go to mailman 3
>with hyperkitty on the new servers.

Only mailman2 is available right now.

% dnf list 'mailman*'
Last metadata expiration check: 0:00:49 ago on Tue 21 Apr 2020 08:10:25 PM GMT.
Installed Packages
mailman.x86_64             3:2.1.29-4.module_el8.0.0+34+0459d3d0  @AppStream
Available Packages
mailman-debuginfo.x86_64   3:2.1.29-4.module_el8.0.0+34+0459d3d0  base-debuginfo
mailman-debugsource.x86_64 3:2.1.29-4.module_el8.0.0+34+0459d3d0  base-debuginfo

As I said in a previous reply:

On Sat, Apr 18, 2020 at 10:58:31PM -0400, Christopher Faylor wrote:
>There have been a few threads with people complaining about the change
>in some of the other sourceware lists but we're using the officially
>supported solution for maintaining a mailing list on RHEL and that is
>not going to change.

The overseers discussed a couple of other alternatives to mailman2 +
postfix like inbox and exim but, in the end, chose to stick with what
was supported and most common.  This is to avoid a situation from old
sourceware incarnations where we limped along for twenty years using the
barely supported/unsupported qmail+ezmlm combo (along with their
companion replacement for bind).

qmail and ezmlm were both amazing pieces of software but they were
showing their age in the era of DMARC, DKIM, and SPF.

Anyway, if another mailing list package becomes available then we'll
look at it but we are letting things settle down after the major move of
sourceware to new hardware and software.