[Mailman-Developers] Mailman 2.x Roadmap

[Mark Sapiro]

Thijs Kinkhorst wrote:
>
>On Monday 5 January 2009 17:09, Mark Sapiro wrote:
>> Please don't start (or extend) a list of downstream things to look at
>> in the week before a release. First of all, I'm just compulsive enough
>> to actually look, but even so, the most likely result is I'll be
>> overwhelmed, defer everything and then forget about it.
>
>I have on behalf of Debian a while ago reported a number of our patches to the
>SF.net tracker, which have not seen any response yet. It's not that we're not
>willing to contribute patches back, but the previous approach of reporting
>them to the patch tracker hasn't been fruitful. I have also sent selected
>patches to the development list in the past with the same result.
>So I guessed I'd try something different instead.


Of the 32 patches under the '"series" style patches'-header: at
http://patch-tracking.debian.net/package/mailman/1:2.1.11-8, two of
them carry the note "Submitted upstream" with a SF tracker URL and one
notes "Applied upstream"

Of the other 29, my first glance indicates at least four of them are
Debian specific, and one is to an unmaintained "contrib" module.

Many of the remaining 24 are like
<http://patch-tracking.debian.net/patch/series/view/mailman/1:2.1.11-8/00_stolen_from_HEAD.patch>
which carries the note: "Handle empty queue files." I see what this
patch does, but I am unable to see why it is necessary. If it were
reported in a tracker (I assume it's in a Debian tracker somewhere,
but why should I have to search for it?), at least I'd have some
information about symptoms and causes that would enable me to evaluate
it.

(and at the moment, your entire patch tracking system seems to be not
working since all the URLs which I recorded yesterday throw Python
exceptions at me today and the link you provided says "There was an
error processing ur request
can't find any package named or containing 'mailman'")



>> If downstream patches are of general applicability or address bugs in
>> the upstream distribution, they should be reported in the upstream
>> tracker (currently <https://bugs.launchpad.net/mailman>).
>
>Do I understand it correctly that I should resubmit the patches to this new
>tracker?


No. All the RFEs and bug reports were migrated from SF to the LP
tracker. Due to a processing glitch, patches more recent than
2002-04-03 were not migrated, but this is an issue we expect to fix.
See <https://bugs.launchpad.net/mailman/+bug/294223> for more on this
migration glitch.

Again, you don't have to resubmit anything from the SF tracker.


>We're quite willing to help you get useful patches integrated, but our time is
>also limited so I'm looking for the way that is most effective for both of
>us.


I appreciate that, and I am well aware that there is stuff in the
tracker that has been sitting unattended for a long while. I am trying
to attend to new tracker items as they arrive (at least those that
address bugs) and hopefully the old ones will get looked at too.

No system is perfect, but in general, the upstream tracker is the best
place. At least things can be found there, whereas things buried in
mailboxes or the archives of mailing lists are much more likely to be
overlooked.

-- 
Mark Sapiro <mark at msapiro.net>        The highway is for gamblers,
San Francisco Bay Area, California    better use your sense - B. Dylan