[Mailman-Developers] Mailman Sprint was fun at PyCon 2016 Canada!

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Note updated Subject. ;-)

First time as a sprint leader, got really lucky with the sprinters.
ellmetha did a bunch of work (4 MRs!) without a word [of English ;-];
I talked with mdupuis quite a bit but didn't need to look at any of
his code at the time.  I don't know if the code is up to snuff, but
they picked useful things to work on!

Back in the conversation about distribution, Barry Warsaw writes:

 > I think I missed a reference to Simon's script, but I'd be
 > interested in that approach too.

I didn't understand it correctly myself, but Simon explains in a
parallel followup to your message.

What I have in mind is a script that

(1a) takes an argument which is a tuple of git refs, defaulting to our
    most recent release tags in the version for that release
(1b) takes an argument which is a non-existent directory to create
(1c) takes an argument which is the install prefix, default /usr/local
(2) checks for prereqs, if not satisified exits with error message
(3) creates the directory, cds there
(4) creates appropriate venvs
(5) clones 6 projects from gitlab
(6) checkouts each project at its configured ref, see (1)
(7) builds each project with appropriate venv
(8) installs to $prefix/usr/mailman and $prefix/var/mailman (ignoring
    distro policy if different!)
(9) prints a message pointing to instructions for configuring MTA and
    webserver

Maybe we can do better than (9) for Postscript, Exim (which is what I
use, so my hand is up for that), and Apache.

 > At this point it sounds like we shouldn't fixate on a single
 > deployment mechanism; we can provide some official containers, help
 > distro packagers, and above all, have really good documentation.

I don't know about containers, I'm old-fashioned (and the only useful
things my damn accountants will let me spend money on is travel and
computers, I'm swimming in hosts although not IPs or time to play with
containers).  How much work would that be?  Can we really expect our
mom-and-pop users to have containerized hosts available?  Do cPanel
hosts do containers?

But as you know "really good documentation" is (a) a lot of work and
(b) the product of reponsive users, especially beta testers.  We
shouldn't promise that yet.

Just-back-to-JP-from-PyConCA-and-a-successful-Mailman-sprint-ly y'rs,