Mailman 3 - Mailman-announce

forwarded message from Guido van Rossum
by barry＠wooz.org 30 Oct '00

30 Oct '00

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Announcing Mailman 2.0 release candidate 1
by barry＠wooz.org 24 Oct '00

24 Oct '00

Hello folks, Okay, we're really close now! I've put together Mailman 2.0 release candidate 1 and uploaded it to SourceForge. You can grab the tarball from the file release page at http://sourceforge.net/project/shownotes.php?release_id=14446 www.list.org and www.gnu.org should be updated soon. This release contains a bunch of bug fixes and a few local security patches. The source code is essentially frozen, modulo any last minute show stopper bugs. I will probably make a pass at the documentation before the final release. Expect 2.0 final hopefully by the weekend. Enjoy, -Barry

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Announcing Mailman 2.0 beta 6
by bwarsaw＠beopen.com 24 Sep '00

24 Sep '00

Folks, I'm pleased to announce the release of Mailman 2.0 beta 6. In this release most of the bugs and patches submitted to SourceForge have been resolved. See below for a list of changes since 2.0 beta 5. I've tested this release with Python 1.5.2, 1.6, and 2.0beta1+CVS. This will be the last beta before 2.0 final. I think Mailman 2.0 is now stable enough to be unleashed on the unsuspecting public :). Besides, it's way overdue and there are lots of important new features that are backed up waiting for this to get out. I plan to release 2.0 final about a week after Python 2.0 final is released. That currently puts Mailman 2.0 final out on lucky Friday October 13th. If the Python release is pushed back, Mailman may be pushed back too. Much thanks to everyone who has helped Mailman to where it is, either through bug reports, patch submissions, important feedback, and extensive testing. I'd like to single out Jeremy Hylton on this release for coming to the rescue at the last minute and working on Pipermail to fix bugs, add support for non-ASCII charsets, and improve its performance. [Side note: I was in New York City last night doing a gig at the Lion's Den with my band, and I met the guitarist's Linuxhead network administrator friend. We were talking geek shop after the show and I mentioned I worked on "a mailing list manager". He said, "Oh, like Mailman?" :) ] As usual, you can get the tarball from SourceForge http://download.sourceforge.net/mailman/mailman-2.0beta6.tgz or list.org http://www.list.org/mailman.tar.gz or (soon) ftp.gnu.org ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/mailman/mailman-2.0beta6.tgz Enjoy, -Barry 2.0 beta 6 (22-Sep-2000) - Building o Tested with Python 1.5.2, Python 1.6, and Python 2.0 beta 1. Conducted on RH Linux 6.1 only, but should work cross-platform. o Configure now accepts --with-username, --with-groupname, --with-var-prefix flags. See `configure --help' or the INSTALL file for details. o Setting the CFLAGS environment variable before invoking configure now works. o The icons are now copied into $prefix/icons at install time. Patch by David Champion. - Standards o Compliance with RFC 2369 (List-*: headers). Patch by Darrell Fuhriman. List-ID: header is kept for historical reasons. o Fixes by Jeremy Hylton to Pipermail in support of non-ASCII charsets, based on the Content-Type: and encoded-words in the original message. Mail headers are now decoded as per RFC 2047. o Many more bounce formats are detected: Microsoft's SMTPSVC, Compuserve, GroupWise, SMTP32, and the more generic SimpleMatch (which catches lots of similar but slightly different formats). - Defaults o Email addresses can now be obscured in Pipermail archives by setting mm_cfg.ARCHIVER_OBSCURES_EMAILADDRS to 1 (obscuring is turned off by default). Patch provided by Chris Snell. o The default NNTP host can now be set by editing mm_cfg.DEFAULT_NNTP_HOST. Patch by David Champion. o The default archiving mode (public/private) can now be set by editing mm_cfg.DEFAULT_ARCHIVE. Patch by Ted Cabeen. - Web UI o The variable details pages in the administrators interface is now `live', i.e. there's a submit button on the details page. o A link to the administrative interface is placed in the footer of the general user pages (authentication still required, of course!) o The user options change results page has a link back to the user's main page. o In the admindb page (for dealing with held postings), the default forward address is now listname-owner instead of listname-admin. This avoids bounce detection on the forwarded message. - Miscellaneous o Fixed config.db corruption problem when disk-full errors are encountered. o Command line scripts accept list names case-insensitively. o bin/remove_members takes a -a flag to remove all members of a list in one fell swoop. o List admin passwords must be non-empty. o Mailman generated passwords are slightly more mnemonic, and shouldn't have confusing character selections (i.e. `i' only, but no `1' or `l'). o Crossposting to two gated mailing lists should be fixed. o Many other bug fixes and minor web UI improvements.

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Mailman 2.0 beta 5
by bwarsaw＠beopen.com 02 Aug '00

02 Aug '00

Folks, I've just released Mailman 2.0 beta 5. This is an important bug fix release that should once and for all solve the "cookie re-authentication" bug. It also fixes a small security hole that could be exploited by clever local users to gain group mailman permission. As usual, you can get the tarball from SourceForge http://download.sourceforge.net/mailman/mailman-2.0beta5.tgz or list.org http://www.list.org/mailman.tar.gz or (soon) ftp.gnu.org ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/mailman/mailman-2.0beta5.tgz Please let me know how it goes for you. Remember to use the SourceForge bug tracker for reporting bugs NOT the old Jitterbug database on python.org (which I cannot shut off right now). Also, patches should be uploaded to the SourceForge patch manager. Enjoy, -Barry

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Mailman 2.0 beta 4
by bwarsaw＠beopen.com 07 Jul '00

07 Jul '00

Folks, I've just released Mailman 2.0 beta 4. This is an important bug fix release that fixes problems with bin/newlist, the bundled pipermail archiving, the new admindb forward feature, and a few other problems. If you are running 2.0beta3, I strongly urge you to upgrade. As usual you can get the tarball from SourceForge http://download.sourceforge.net/mailman/mailman-2.0beta4.tgz or list.org http://www.list.org/mailman.tar.gz or (soon) ftp.gnu.org ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/mailman/mailman-2.0beta4.tgz Due to the ongoing negotiations with CNRI, this release is /not/ available from ftp.python.org. :( For those of you on the cutting edge, I'd like to get as much feedback as possible over the next two weeks. I still plan on releasing the final version on the Friday before the O'Reilly Open Source conference (which, contrary to previous plans, I will not be attending). It's possible I'll make one more beta release before then. Cheers, -Barry

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Announcing Mailman 2.0 beta 3
by bwarsaw＠beopen.com 29 Jun '00

29 Jun '00

Okay folks, I am finally releasing Mailman 2.0 beta 3. I think I have nailed the duplicates problem -- at least I have seen no duplicates in the last 24 hours on python.org, so I'm feeling good about it (we'll see if that lasts tomorrow morning :). Please give this version a thorough test; I'd like to have a much shorter release cycle for the next few betas. I am aiming to release 2.0 final on July 14th, the Friday before the O'Reilly OSSCON. I plan on spending time between now and then on slogging through the discussion lists and bug reports, and working on the documentation. See below for an excerpt from the NEWS file for changes since 2.0beta2. If you have not been following the CVS updates and are upgrading from 2.0 beta 2 or earlier PLEASE READ THE UPGRADING FILE! A crucial step is to reload your crontab.in file, otherwise you won't clear your message queue often enough (or perhaps not at all). Enjoy, -Barry -------------------- snip snip -------------------- 2.0 beta 3 (26-Jun-2000) - Delivery mechanism (qrunner) refined to support immediate queuing, queuing directly from MTA, and queuing on any error along the delivery pipeline. This means 1) that huge lists can't time out the MTA's program delivery channel; 2) it is much harder to completely lose messages; 3) eventually, qrunner will be elaborated to meter delivery to the MTA so as not to swamp it. The tradeoff is in more disk I/O since every message coming into the system (and most that are generated by the system) live on disk for some part of their journey through Mailman. For now, see the Default.py variables QRUNNER_PROCESS_LIFETIME and QRUNNER_MAX_MESSAGES for primitive resource management. The API to the pipeline handler modules has changed. See Mailman/Handlers/HandlerAPI.py for details. - Revamped admindb web page: held messages are split into headers and bodies so they are easier to vette; admins can now also preserve a held message (for spam evidence gathering) or forward the message to a specified email address; disposition of held messages can be deferred; held messages have a more context meaningful default rejection message. - Change to the semantics for `acceptable_aliases' list configuration variable, based on suggestions by Harald Meland. - New mm_cfg.py variables NNTP_USERNAME and NNTP_PASSWORD can be set on a site-wide basis if connection to your nntpd requires authentication. - The list attribute `num_spawns' has been removed. The mm_cfg.py variables MAX_SPAWNS, and DEFAULT_NUM_SPAWNS removed too. - LIST_LOCK_LIFETIME cranked to 5 hours and LIST_LOCK_TIMEOUT shortened to 10 seconds. QRUNNER_LOCK_LIFETIME cranked up to 10 hours. This should decrease the changes for bogus and harmful lock breaking. - Resent-to: is now one of the headers checked for explicit destinations. - Tons more bounce formats are recognized. The API to the bounce modules has changed. - A written LockFile module which should fix most (hopefully all) bugs in the locking machinery. Many improvements suggested by Thomas Wouters and Harald Meland. - Experimental support (disabled by default) for delivering SMTP chunks to the MTA via multiple threads. Your Python executable must have been compiled with thread support enabled, and you must set MAX_DELIVERY_THREADS in mm_cfg.py. Note that this may not improve your overall system performance. - Some changes and additions to scripts: bin/find_member now supports a -w/--owner flag to match regexps against mailing list owners; bin/find_member now supports multiple regexps; cron/gate_news command line option changes; new script bin/dumbdb for debugging purposes; bin/clone_member can now also remove the old address and change change the list owner addresses. - The News/Mail gateway admin page has a button that lets you do an explicit catchup of the newsgroup. - The CVS repository has been moved out to SourceForge. For more information, see the project summary at http://sourceforge.net/project/?group_id=103 - Lots 'o bug fixes and some performance improvements.

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forwarded message from Guido van Rossum
by bwarsaw＠python.org 30 May '00

30 May '00

Hi folks, I'm forwarding Guido's announcement to these lists. It's relevant here because part of what I am doing officially for BeOpen is work on Mailman. This is a very exciting move for all of us, and should be good for the Mailman community. As it relates to Mailman, nothing really changes. Mailman is and will remain GPL'd open source software. I'm concentrating on finishing up the 2.0 release and expect that to happen over the next several weeks. Currently, I'm sipping through a slow dialup, but expect to get upgraded to DSL as soon as the local phone company gets their act together. This should quicken the pace of my responses and checkins. Cheers, -Barry ------- start of forwarded message (RFC 934 encapsulation) ------- From: Guido van Rossum <guido(a)python.org> Sender: psa-members-announce-admin(a)python.org To: python-list(a)python.org (Python mailing list), python-announce(a)python.org, psa-members-announce(a)python.org Subject: [PSA MEMBERS ANNOUNCE] ANNOUNCEMENT: Python Development Team Moves to BeOpen.com Date: Tue, 30 May 2000 14:05:43 -0500 X-BeenThere: psa-members-announce(a)python.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.0beta3 To all Python users and developers: Python is growing rapidly. In order to take it to the next level, I've moved with my core development group to a new employer, BeOpen.com. BeOpen.com is a startup company with a focus on open source communities, and an interest in facilitating next generation application development. It is a natural fit for Python. At BeOpen.com I am the director of a new development team named PythonLabs. The team includes three of my former colleagues at CNRI: Fred Drake, Jeremy Hylton, and Barry Warsaw. Another familiar face will joins us shortly: Tim Peters. We have our own website (www.pythonlabs.com) where you can read more about us, our plans and our activities. We've also posted a FAQ there specifically about PythonLabs, our transition to BeOpen.com, and what it means for the Python community. What will change, and what will stay the same? First of all, Python will remain Open Source. In fact, everything we produce at PythonLabs will be released with an Open Source license. Also, www.python.org will remain the number one website for the Python community. CNRI will continue to host it, and we'll maintain it as a community project. What changes is how much time we have for Python. Previously, Python was a hobby or side project, which had to compete with our day jobs; at BeOpen.com we will be focused full time on Python development! This means that we'll be able to spend much more time on exciting new projects like Python 3000. We'll also get support for website management from BeOpen.com's professional web developers, and we'll work with their marketing department. Marketing for Python, you ask? Sure, why not! We want to grow the size of the Python user and developer community at an even faster pace than today. This should benefit everyone: the larger the community, the more resources will be available to all, and the easier it will be to find Python expertise when you need it. We're also planning to make commercial offerings (within the Open Source guidelines!) to help Python find its way into the hands of more programmers, especially in large enterprises where adoption is still lagging. There's one piece of bad news: Python 1.6 won't be released by June 1st. There's simply too much left to be done. We promise that we'll get it out of the door as soon as possible. By the way, Python 1.6 will be the last release from CNRI; after that, we'll issue Python releases from BeOpen.com. Oh, and to top it all off, I'm going on vacation. I'm getting married and will be relaxing on my honeymoon. For all questions about PythonLabs, write to pythonlabs-info(a)beopen.com. - --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/) _______________________________________________ PSA-Members-Announce mailing list PSA-Members-Announce(a)python.org http://www.python.org/mailman/listinfo/psa-members-announce ------- end -------

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[ANNOUNCE] Mailman 2.0 beta 2
by Barry A. Warsaw 08 Apr '00

08 Apr '00

I've just uploaded the Mailman 2.0 beta 2 tarball to the following locations: http://www.list.org/mailman.tar.gz http://download.sourceforge.net/mailman/mailman-2.0beta2.tgz ftp://ftp.python.org/pub/mailman/mailman-2.0beta2.tgz See the UPGRADING file for details on upgrading from 1.1 or 2.0beta1. See the NEWS file for a complete description of changes for every version; below is an excerpt for changes since 2.0beta1. Barring any showstopping bugs, this will be the last release until I finish my taxes. :) Enjoy, -Barry -------------------- snip snip -------------------- - Rewritten gate_news cron script which should be more efficient and avoid race and locking problems. Each list now maintains its own watermark, and when you use the admin CGI script to turn on gating from Usenet->mail, an automatic mass catch up is done to avoid flooding the mailing list. cron/gate_news's command line interface has also changed. See its docstring for details. - A new cron script called qrunner has been added to retry message deliveries that fail because of temporary smtpd problems. - New command line script called bin/list_lists which does exactly that: lists all the mailing lists on the system (much like the listinfo CGI does). - bin/withlist is now directly executable, however if you want to use python -i, you must still explicitly invoke it. bin/withlist also now cleans up after itself by unlocking any locked lists. It does NOT save any dirty lists though - you must do this explicitly. - $prefix permissions (and all subdirs) must now be 02775. bin/check_perms has been updated to fix all the subdir permissions. - "make update" (a.k.a. bin/update) is run automatically when you do a "make install" - The CGI driver script now puts information about the Python environment into the logs/error file (but not the diagnostic web page). - Bug fixes and some performance improvements

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Re: [Mailman-Users] [ANNOUNCE] Mailman 2.0 beta 1
by bwarsaw＠cnri.reston.va.us 24 Mar '00

24 Mar '00

>>>>> "RH" == Ralf Hildebrandt <R.Hildebrandt(a)tu-bs.de> writes: RH> You know what really bugs me: It's called mailman.tar.gz Try http://www.list.org/mailman-2.0beta1.tgz. mailman.tar.gz is just symlinked to this (or whatever the latest tarball is). This works better for people who have automated scripts that suck distributions down because they don't have to change their script each time. You can even get older tarballs if you decode the naming scheme and guess at a URL. :) RH> What happened to 1.2 ? I've got 1.1 installed, updated via CVS RH> to mailman-1.2b1 and now we have 2.0 ? =:) Sounds like you're not on mailman-developers. Read this. http://www.python.org/pipermail/mailman-developers/2000-March/001911.html -Barry

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[ANNOUNCE] Mailman 2.0 beta 1
by Barry A. Warsaw 22 Mar '00

22 Mar '00

I've just uploaded the Mailman 2.0 beta 1 tarball to www.list.org. I decided to name the new version "2.0" because of the architectural changes that have been made. See the excerpt from the NEWS file below for details of what's changed since version 1.1. Two important things to take note of. You will need Python 1.5.2 to run this version of Mailman. Also, if you are upgrading from Mailman 1.x you will need to read the UPGRADING file for instructions. I don't plan to make wider release announcements until 2.0 final is ready to go, but I also don't expect the beta cycle to be very long. We'll see! Enjoy, -Barry -------------------- snip snip -------------------- - A new bundled auto-responder has been added. You can now configure an autoresponse text for each list's primary addresses: listname(a)yourhost.com -- the general posting address listname-request@... -- the automated "request bot" address listname-admin@... -- the human administrator address - The standard UI now includes three logos at the bottom of the page: Dragon's Mailman logo, the Python Powered logo, and the GNU logo. All point to their respective home pages. - It is now possible to set the Reply-To: field on lists to an arbitrary address. NOTE: Reply-To: munging is generally considered harmful! However for some read-only lists, it is useful to direct replies to a parallel discussion list. - There is a new message delivery architecture which uses a pipeline processor for incoming and internally generated messages. Mailman no longer contains a bundled bulk-mailer; instead message delivery is handled completely by the MTA. Most MTAs give a high enough priority to connections from the localhost that mail will not be lost because of system load, but this is not guaranteed (or handled) by Mailman currently. Be careful also if your smtpd is on a different host than the Mailman host. In practice, mail lossage has not be observed. For this reason cron/run_queue is no longer needed (see the UPGRADING file for details). Also, you can choose whether you want direct smtp delivery, or delivery via the command line to a sendmail-compatible daemon. You can also easily add your own delivery module. See Mailman/Defaults.py for details. - A similar pipeline architecture for the parsing of bounce messages has been added. Most common bounce formats are now handled, including Qmail, Postfix, and DSN. It is now much easier to add new bounce detectors. - The approval pending architecture has also been revamped. Subscription requests and message posts waiting for admin approval are no longer kept in the config.db file, but in a separate requests.db file instead. - Finally made consistent the use of Sender:/From:/From_ in the matching of headers for such things as member-post-only. Now, if USE_ENVELOPE_SENDER is true, Sender: will always be chosen over From:, however the default has been changed to USE_ENVELOPE_SENDER false so that From: is always chosen over Sender:. In both cases, if no header is found, From_ (i.e. the envelope sender is used). Note that the variable is now misnamed! Most people want From: matching anyway and any are easily spoofable. - New scripts bin/move_list, bin/config_list - cron/upvolumes_yearly, cron/upvolumes_monthly, cron/archive, cron/run_queue all removed. Edit your crontab if you used these scripts. Other scripts removed: contact_transport, deliver, dumb_deliver. - Several web UI improvements, especially in the admin page. - Remove X-pmrqc: headers to prevent return reciepts for Pegasus mail users. - Security patch when using external archivers. - Honor "X-Archive: No" header by not putting this message in the archive. - Changes to the log file format. - The usual bug fixes.

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