[Distutils] This list will soon be migrating to Mailman 3

[Nick Coghlan]

Hi folks,

The recent discussion of communication workflows prompted me to
investigate exactly what would be involved in migrating the list to
Mailman 3 (with its native web gateway and other account management
improvements), and I'm happy to report that there don't appear to be
any blockers to our initiating the migration.

I'm currently planning to send the migration request to
postmaster at python.org later this week (probably Thursday evening), but
don't have an ETA for how long the actual migration may take after
that (as I believe distutils-sig will be one of the larger python.org
list migrations undertaken so far).

Accordingly, this is an initial heads up as to exactly what the change
will mean:

1. If you only ever access the mailing list via email, and never
tinker with your subscription settings or look up threads in the list
archives, then you shouldn't notice any real changes other than some
of the headers on mails from the list changing a bit (such as the new
Archived-At header appearing on each message).

2. If you do use the website to change your subscription settings or
look up threads in the list archives, or have wished you had a more
web-forum-like interface for accessing the list, then the rest of this
email is likely to be of interest :)

== Changes to subscription management (and list moderation) ==

Mailman 3 relies on a more conventional user account management model
than the historically list-centric model in Mailman 2. This means that
either before or after the migration, folks that want to modify their
subscription settings will need to go to https://mail.python.org/mm3/
and register for an account.

If you use GitLab, GitHub, Google, or Facebook, then you can go
straight to https://mail.python.org/mm3/accounts/login/, select one of
those options, and grant the required access to look up your email
address. (At least for GitHub, the request will come from Mark
Sapiro's developer key, and I believe that's the case for the other
services as well)

If your address on the linked service matches your subscription
address, then you're done. If it doesn't match, then you can head to
https://mail.python.org/mm3/accounts/email/ to register more addresses
(and hence link any related subscriptions to your account).

If you don't use any of those services, or simply don't want to use
them with mail.python.org, then head to
https://mail.python.org/mm3/accounts/signup/ to create a conventional
username-and-password based account.

Regardless of how you sign up, the primary authentication mechanism is
access to the relevant email address - the old MM2 plain text email
password isn't used at all.

After the migration, the current
https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig URL will
automatically redirect to
https://mail.python.org/mm3/mailman3/lists/distutils-sig.python.org/

For a working example of what that will look like, see
https://mail.python.org/mm3/mailman3/lists/core-workflow.python.org/

== Changes to list archiving (and the native web gateway) ==

After the migration, the current list archive at
https://mail.python.org/pipermail/distutils-sig/ will remain in place
in order to preserve existing links, but will no longer be updated
with new messages. That page will also be updated with a link to the
new archiver/web gateway page.

That page will be at
https://mail.python.org/mm3/archives/list/distutils-sig@python.org/,
and not only features stable and predictable URLs for each post, but
also includes a native web gateway, allowing folks to both create new
threads and reply to existing ones using the web page, without needing
to explicitly subscribe to the list first.

Again, core-workflow provides an example of what that will look like
in practice, with the new archive at
https://mail.python.org/mm3/archives/list/core-workflow@python.org/,
and the post-migration legacy archive at
https://mail.python.org/pipermail/core-workflow/.

Regards,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia