[Mailman-Developers] Thinking about Gmane

[Barry Warsaw]

You may have seen this post from Lars Ingebrigtsen of Gnus and Gmane fame; it
was linked from Slashdot over the weekend:

https://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/2016/07/28/the-end-of-gmane/

If you're not familiar with Gmane, you really should check it out while you
can.  I think it's the perfect companion to Mailman, providing free archives
for open source mailing lists of all kind.  My favorite thing about it is the
NNTP interface to mailing list archives.  Remember Usenet?  It's really NNTP
underneath and there are some excellent news readers that let you have very
good access to years of older posts.  I am a Claw-Mail user and it provides a
fairly seamless integration of regular email and news (e.g. Gmane over NNTP).

The powerful thing for me is that for mailing lists I care about, but don't
want to be subscribed to, I can just catch up every so often on the Gmane
newsgroup.  I can even post from the Gmane mirror, and I don't have to keep
personal archives of any mirrored public mailing list.  All the Mailman lists
are available on Gmane.

But Lars has apparently burned out and is considering shuddering Gmane.  This
would be a huge loss for the FLOSS community IMHO, and I hope the outpouring
of goodwill on his blog posts (along with any donations of time, resources,
and money) will keep Gmane alive.  It seems like all might not be lost:

https://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/2016/07/28/the-end-of-gmane/comment-page-1/#comment-13502

Getting back to Mailman, I've long wanted a built-in NNTP interface to mailing
list archives.  Long ago I prototyped a bridge from Mailman 2 to NNTP via
Twisted.  It wasn't that much work, but of course it was only a prototype.
With Mailman 3's architecture, I think it would be a fairly straightforward
project, so I'm here to hopefully excite and challenge one of *you* to think
about doing it. :)

Of course, it wouldn't be Gmane, and I'm not sure we need exactly that.
First, it wouldn't be federated across the wide FLOSS world, but it would
still be extremely useful.  Second, we have so much goodness in HyperKitty
that the web side of Gmane wouldn't be as important for us.  Still, the
ability to have direct NNTP access to mailing list archives built into Mailman
3 would be really darn cool, IMHO.

As an aside, Lars would make the whole of the Gmane spool available, and it
might be really cool to see how well HK can consume and vend it.  Given that
Lars seems to say that it's more likely that the NNTP/SMTP bridge will
survive, but not the web ui.  Wouldn't it be cool if HK could serve as a
modern version of a web ui to the Gmane treasure trove?

Anyway, I'm putting this out there - hopefully some one of you might be
willing and able to take it up.

Cheers,
-Barry
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 819 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-developers/attachments/20160729/699173e8/attachment.sig>