[Mailman-Developers] Getting to Mailman 3.0 final

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Patrick Ben Koetter writes:

 > I think if we release MM3 without 'a frontend' we will miss
 > people's expectation to get a feature complete MLM - which includes
 > a frontend in most peoples opinion I guess.

I agree on the basis of introspection (which is obviously a
statistically biased sample), and pretty clearly the people who are
currently posting "will I get feature X if I use Mailman 3" aren't
thinking "I don't mind if I lose features Y, Z, and W, too" when they
do.

It's possible that there's a vast silent majority who understand the
implications of the regular statement that "Mailman 3 will not be a
front end, but rather front ends will communicate with Mailman 3 via a
RESTful interface".  Even if so, I think the "what were they thinking,
releasing without a bundled front end!?" crowd is going to be large,
and they will leave and will not come back soon.  In particular, I
doubt we'll get any interest from cPanel et al[1], which to date has
been an important way that Mailman gets introduced to people.

Footnotes: 
[1]  They don't strike me as being creative enough to figure out that
this means they can write their own proprietary front end.