[Mailman-Announce] Announcing Mailman 2.0 beta 6

[Barry A. Warsaw]

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.