Happy new year everyone!
I'm starting to prep Python for GSoC 2021, and I wanted to issue the usual invitation that we'd be happy to have Mailman as a sub-org if anyone wants to do GSoC this year. (Mailman's been fine as a separate org, but I have to do the paperwork for Python anyhow so I figured I'd offer if there's interest but no one wants to cover the admin side of things.)
Also, I have two mailman related ideas!
- Seamless archive converter for 2.1 -> 3.*
A friend was grousing that there was no "nice" way to retain old archive urls without keeping a static copy of things, and it got me to thinking that it would definitely be possible to build something that handled the old urls and redirected or made them work seamlessly, but we didn't do it because parsing the old archives basically requires you to scrape them because otherwise we couldn't guarantee that the urls would be stable from a re-parsed mbox.
It's boring and finicky web scraping work to associate the old url and do the right things to make it work seamlessly in hyperkitty, but probably not too hard, so I was thinking that it might be suitable for a GSoC student.
- Old mailman "skin" for postorius
Make mailman look like the 2.1 interface for people who really love the old system. There's a few options that would be different, but the goal would be to make it pretty much look the same only with a few options changed, for people who are very change adverse. We had intended for it to be *possible* to reskin Postorius, but I don't think too many people have done it, so this would be a test to see how doable that is and probably fix any underlying issues that make reskinning the interface hard. Honestly, we could also have a student do a brand new skin if we had someone who loved UI design, but I suspect replicating the old interface would be less work, and since this year's GSoC hours have been cut in half, i'd rather start with something easier.
I've been out of mailman dev for 3 years, so I'm probably not the ideal mentor, but I'm up for helping on either of those if Mailman as a whole is interested in doing the GSoC thing this year.
Terri
On Mon, Jan 04, 2021 at 12:49:58PM -0800, Terri Oda wrote:
- Old mailman "skin" for postorius
Make mailman look like the 2.1 interface for people who really love the old system. There's a few options that would be different, but the goal would be to make it pretty much look the same only with a few options changed, for people who are very change adverse. We had intended for it to be *possible* to reskin Postorius, but I don't think too many people have done it, so this would be a test to see how doable that is and probably fix any underlying issues that make reskinning the interface hard. Honestly, we could also have a student do a brand new skin if we had someone who loved UI design, but I suspect replicating the old interface would be less work, and since this year's GSoC hours have been cut in half, i'd rather start with something easier.
Good call!
On this front: last time I checked, Postorius seemed to *require*, for at least some features, that users browse with JavaScript enabled.
However, there exist good security reasons, and also good accessibility reasons (depending on one's disability), to *not* browse the web with JavaScript enabled.
So, if a GSOC student takes up your suggestion and makes a 2.1-like skin for Postorius, please could you (or whoever ends up mentoring) work with the student to try to ensure that the skin is *entirely* usable without JavaScript. Aaron Gustafson's "Adaptive Web Design" (1st ed) would probably be a good starting point: https://adaptivewebdesign.info/1st-edition/index.html
Thanks for reading this far. And if I was mistaken (or out of date) about Postorius requiring JavaScript, I would be very happy to stand corrected.
(Lest I seem to be complaining unduly, I should add that other than the Postorius issue mentioned above, I think MailMan is pretty great on the whole and I am grateful that it exists and continues to be maintained/improved.)
Sam
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On Tue., Jan. 5, 2021, 1:10 p.m. Sam Kuper, <sampablokuper@posteo.net> wrote:
Thanks for reading this far. And if I was mistaken (or out of date) about Postorius requiring JavaScript, I would be very happy to stand corrected.
Having the postorious interface work without JavaScript was one of our original design goals, because of the problems with JavaScript and screen readers. So if it doesn't work without js, please file bugs with specific areas that aren't working. Usability for screen readers and others who can't use js will always be important.
There is JavaScript, but it was intended for bonus helper stuff like "sort this list by this column" and "select all" and should be limited to that (and i think the controls for that were supposed to vanish when js was unavailable)
That said, I haven't been very involved with mailman since I took off time while pregnant, so it's possible the folk in charge have added stuff since I last did an accessibility audit, I think in 2017 or so?
Terri
On Tue, Jan 05, 2021 at 01:31:45PM -0800, Terri Oda wrote:
On Tue., Jan. 5, 2021, 1:10 p.m. Sam Kuper, wrote:
Thanks for reading this far. And if I was mistaken (or out of date) about Postorius requiring JavaScript, I would be very happy to stand corrected.
Having the postorious interface work without JavaScript was one of our original design goals, because of the problems with JavaScript and screen readers. So if it doesn't work without js, please file bugs with specific areas that aren't working. Usability for screen readers and others who can't use js will always be important.
There is JavaScript, but it was intended for bonus helper stuff like "sort this list by this column" and "select all" and should be limited to that (and i think the controls for that were supposed to vanish when js was unavailable)
That said, I haven't been very involved with mailman since I took off time while pregnant, so it's possible the folk in charge have added stuff since I last did an accessibility audit, I think in 2017 or so?
Sorry for my delay.
Thank you for incorporating accessibility into the original design goals of Postorius.
Having checked, it looks like the web pages I was thinking of are in fact powered by Hyperkitty, not Postorius.
Here is an example of a page where JavaScript seems to be required but should not be:
https://mail.python.org/archives/list/mailman-users@python.org/
On that page, I see three "spinner" icons. Presumably they are supposed to disappear and be replaced by content or menus. But without JavaScript enabled, that doesn't happen, which makes the page hard to navigate.
Here is another example:
https://mail.python.org/archives/list/mailman-users@python.org/thread/ZVM6I4...
There is a spinner near the bottom of that page. Presumably it is supposed to be replaced by follow-up messages in the thread, but without JavaScript enabled, that doesn't happen, which makes it impossible to read (at least in the web interface) more than the first message in the thread.
Both those pages say "Powered by HyperKitty version 1.3.5b1." So, as I say, it seems to have been my mistake to think that those archives were powered by Postorius. Apologies for my confusion.
So, Postorius might be fine (I haven't checked), but HyperKitty does seem to have some accessibility problems, as the examples above demonstrate. I have changed the subject line of this email accordingly.
No idea if improving HyperKitty accessibility would be in scope for GSoC, but if so, that might be a good project.
Thank you again,
Sam
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Am 04.01.21 um 21:49 schrieb Terri Oda:
Happy new year everyone!
Happy new year, too!
I've been working on installing mailman3 in several environments where postfix integration is a bit tricky (mailman server is different from postfix mail server, we're using docker in one case) so the handling of lookup maps via files is a pain. On one installation I had to rsync generated maps from the mailman machine to the mail sever, on the other one I'm still struggling to understand why postfix won't open the NFS-shared files having mode 0660 even though uid matches.
So my GSoC proposal is: Provide postfix_domains, postfix_lmtp, postfix_vmap access using the socketmap interface.
Socketmap (http://www.postfix.org/socketmap_table.5.html) is one way of providing maps to Postfix without sharing files. Writing a socketmap server should be easy enough but could be very helpful for multi-server setups.
Cheers, Hans-Martin
On Mon, Jan 4, 2021, at 12:49 PM, Terri Oda wrote:
Happy new year everyone!
Happy new year to you too Terri!
I'm starting to prep Python for GSoC 2021, and I wanted to issue the usual invitation that we'd be happy to have Mailman as a sub-org if anyone wants to do GSoC this year. (Mailman's been fine as a separate org, but I have to do the paperwork for Python anyhow so I figured I'd offer if there's interest but no one wants to cover the admin side of things.)
Thanks for the head start, I do want us to participate this year and am planning to mentor atleast one student.
Also, I have two mailman related ideas!
- Seamless archive converter for 2.1 -> 3.*
A friend was grousing that there was no "nice" way to retain old archive urls without keeping a static copy of things, and it got me to thinking that it would definitely be possible to build something that handled the old urls and redirected or made them work seamlessly, but we didn't do it because parsing the old archives basically requires you to scrape them because otherwise we couldn't guarantee that the urls would be stable from a re-parsed mbox.
It's boring and finicky web scraping work to associate the old url and do the right things to make it work seamlessly in hyperkitty, but probably not too hard, so I was thinking that it might be suitable for a GSoC student.
This sounds like a very nice idea! How are you thinking of associating the web URLs (basically, number of the page I guess?) to Email entries in Hyperkitty since I don't see the web pages having Message-ID.
- Old mailman "skin" for postorius
Make mailman look like the 2.1 interface for people who really love the old system. There's a few options that would be different, but the goal would be to make it pretty much look the same only with a few options changed, for people who are very change adverse. We had intended for it to be *possible* to reskin Postorius, but I don't think too many people have done it, so this would be a test to see how doable that is and probably fix any underlying issues that make reskinning the interface hard. Honestly, we could also have a student do a brand new skin if we had someone who loved UI design, but I suspect replicating the old interface would be less work, and since this year's GSoC hours have been cut in half, i'd rather start with something easier.
Is this intended to be like a CSS refresh or like re-write the interface kind of project? I am thinking it might be more of the former than latter, which might be a much bigger project.
I've been out of mailman dev for 3 years, so I'm probably not the ideal mentor, but I'm up for helping on either of those if Mailman as a whole is interested in doing the GSoC thing this year.
Another idea that I've been thinking is supporting User management in Postorius. It would list all registered Users in Django & Core along with their Addresses and perhaps Subscriptions. If time permits, allow doing some actions on user's behalf like adding a new address, verifying a new address, deleting the User and all their subscriptions etc.
-- thanks, Abhilash Raj (maxking)
Abhilash Raj writes:
On Mon, Jan 4, 2021, at 12:49 PM, Terri Oda wrote:
Happy new year everyone!
Happy new year to you too Terri!
And Happy New Year to everyone, as best we can.
I'm starting to prep Python for GSoC 2021, and I wanted to issue the usual invitation that we'd be happy to have Mailman as a sub-org if anyone wants to do GSoC this year. (Mailman's been fine as a separate org, but I have to do the paperwork for Python anyhow so I figured I'd offer if there's interest but no one wants to cover the admin side of things.)
Thank you very much! Depending on how many students we get, I'm probably available as an emergency/backup mentor for Python.
Thanks for the head start, I do want us to participate this year and am planning to mentor at least one student.
I am also planning to participate. I wonder if there will be an in-person Mentor Summit; if so, I'd like to attend and do some networking. I'm only a couple of years from retirement from the university and likely conversion to full-time software developer (including Mailman, of course, but I have a bunch of ideas and postponed projects). If we go the separate application route, I'm willing to do the org admin part.
I have to get grades in by Jan 18th, and after that I'll be in good shape to work several hours/week on org and/or idea proposals.
Terri, in the past you've allowed rejected orgs to apply as Python suborgs. Did that work out ok? Do you expect to have that policy again this year?
Steve
On Thu, Jan 7, 2021 at 8:13 PM Stephen J. Turnbull < turnbull.stephen.fw@u.tsukuba.ac.jp> wrote:
Terri, in the past you've allowed rejected orgs to apply as Python suborgs. Did that work out ok? Do you expect to have that policy again this year?
Yes, that's the policy again this year! I try to be explicit about it so we have a deadline for folk who prefer to be a sub-org or just want to be listed on our ideas page right away (Feb 12th this year) and a later one for folk who put in separate applications but didn't make the selection cut (March 16 this year). As always, we aren't guaranteed to take every failed applicant, but we'll at least review ideas pages and give a second shot. :)
On Thu, Jan 7, 2021 at 6:28 PM Abhilash Raj <maxking@asynchronous.in> wrote:
On Mon, Jan 4, 2021, at 12:49 PM, Terri Oda wrote:
- Seamless archive converter for 2.1 -> 3.*
This sounds like a very nice idea! How are you thinking of associating the web URLs (basically, number of the page I guess?) to Email entries in Hyperkitty since I don't see the web pages having Message-ID.
If we have mbox files, I think you can get the message-id from there. if you don't, as I said, it's a boring scraping and text comparison job, but it's not infeasible. I'm not terribly picky about how it's done, but the friend who asked about this also has tentatively pledged data (and likely some user feedback on the results and how things work) so ideally a student would get some good direct feedback from at least one organization with a number of archives to convert.
- Old mailman "skin" for postorius Is this intended to be like a CSS refresh or like re-write the interface kind of project? I am thinking it might be more of the former than latter, which might be a much bigger project.
More the former, since projects this year are 175hours instead of 350 (half time or flextime work instead of full-time). I think it will be more than CSS, because we moved a number of options around in an attempt to improve the grouping, so you might need to change the django page templates if you wanted the old groupings to work. And there's probably a few other design decisions that need to be revisited. Plus it would be nice to do an accessibility review on the "skin" which might result in needing additional improvements.
Another idea that I've been thinking is supporting User management in Postorius. It would list all registered Users in Django & Core along with their Addresses and perhaps Subscriptions. If time permits, allow doing some actions on user's behalf like adding a new address, verifying a new address, deleting the User and all their subscriptions etc.
Sounds handy!
Terri Oda writes:
I think it will be more than CSS, because we moved a number of options around in an attempt to improve the grouping, so you might need to change the django page templates
Are CSS and templates considered "code"? ISTR this being quite controversial in the past, since they're declarative rather than algorithmic.
Steve
On Mon, Jan 04, 2021 at 12:49:58PM -0800, Terri Oda wrote:
I'm starting to prep Python for GSoC 2021, and I wanted to issue the usual invitation that we'd be happy to have Mailman as a sub-org if anyone wants to do GSoC this year. (Mailman's been fine as a separate org, but I have to do the paperwork for Python anyhow so I figured I'd offer if there's interest but no one wants to cover the admin side of things.)
Just a thought, but implementing Marius's feature proposal below would be very welcome (in my view, at least). Might it be something an ambitious GSoC student could manage?
Sam
----- Forwarded message from Marius Ghita -----
Date: Fri, 12 Feb 2021 02:16:38 +0200 From: Marius Ghita <ghita.v.marius@gmail.com> To: mailman-developers@python.org Subject: [Mailman-Developers] Feature request, selective participatory threads Message-ID: <CAFSzZzXYbFkzRQuWfTrQvo3fA4kvEKoKz7Tso8MT81xkhX_5rg@mail.gmail.com>
Greetings.
I'm generally a Mailman user through all the open-source projects that require a user to join a mailing list before contributing to a project. As a user that occasionally contributes patches/PRs to random repositories, my mailing list subscriptions are short-lived because I always get more emails than I need.
To that end, I would propose a new feature for Mailman to allow the user to be more selective with the emails it receives.
The following scenarios are those that would work best for me.
- If I send an email to a mailing list, any follow-up emails to that thread are sent to my inbox as well. 2. If a user sends an email through the mailing list that CCs/BCCs me I get all the follow-up emails in that thread as well. 3. Maybe -- and this one is more of an idea than something that I would actually use -- a generated email in the mail archive web view for each thread, to which I could send an email and be subscribed to any follow-up emails to that thread.
For me, this feature would make emails more manageable, and have them behave like subscriptions to individual issues on issue trackers.
My Python is rusty, at best, but I would be happy to help implement this feature in Mailman.
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participants (5)
-
Abhilash Raj -
Hans-Martin Mosner -
Sam Kuper -
Stephen J. Turnbull -
Terri Oda