[Mailman-Users] Versions? Roadmap?

[Brad Knowles]

At 3:34 PM +0100 2006-05-15, David Lee wrote:

>  Is there a Roadmap for future mailman releases?

	There is some information at <http://www.list.org/devs.html>, 
<http://www.list.org/todo.html> and 
<http://www.zope.org/Members/bwarsaw/MailmanDesignNotes/FrontPage>, 
but I think most of the recent activity has been over at 
<http://wiki.list.org/homepage.action>.

>  The current version seems to be 2.1.8.

	Correct.  And I imagine there might be a 2.1.9 sometime in the 
not-to-distant future.

>                                          However I've seen talk in archives
>  about a 2.2.x and a "Mailman 3".

	Barry, Tokio, Mark and others have been talking about various 
things for various versions for a long time.  Barry is primarily 
focused on Mailman3, but I believe that Tokio and Mark may have some 
stuff that they're looking at putting into a potential 2.2.x version 
that would be released sooner.

>                                    I've found the "Mailman-3-dev" archives
>  but that seems to have been dormant for nearly a year (since July 2005).

	Activity has been going on off-list (especially at "sprints" that 
are held at Python conferences), but the list itself has not been 
very active lately.  I'm pretty sure that Barry has been swamped with 
his "real" job, and hasn't had a whole lot of time to document some 
of the work he's been doing.

>  Although we are new (two weeks) to Mailman, we have a few queries about
>  things we cannot find in 2.1.x.  A Roadmap would show us (and other
>  potential site-admins) what features might already be under consideration.

	Regretfully, when it comes to a clear roadmap for future 
versions, there's not much in the way of consolidated documentation 
that I know of.

	Basically, you bug Barry, Tokio, and/or Mark, and then one or the 
other gets around to updating some documentation somewhere as to what 
they currently have in mind, or maybe they just post something to the 
list and one of the non-developers (like me) gets to take that and 
try to turn that into some useful documentation somewhere.

>   o  true virtual hosting: same listname @ many domains;

	That is being worked on.  There are people who have virtual 
hosting implementations that they have developed for themselves, and 
there's even a "virtual host" patch that has been uploaded to the 
SourceForge Mailman patch page.  The patch is pretty old and not 
really a complete solution to the problem, but this is an area of 
active development by the community.

	My hope is that the next generation of this work will be 
completed soon and appropriate patches uploaded to the SourceForge 
pages, as well as being incorporated into an upcoming version of 
Mailman (either 2.1.9 or 2.2.x, depending on how massive the changes 
may be).

>   o  "corporate branding" of Mailman pages.

	There's a certain amount of this that can already be done by 
editing the page templates.  I'd encourage you to search the FAQ 
Wizard and the archives of the list.

	There is a limit to how much you can do easily, however.  The 
more extensive the changes you want, the more likely you are to need 
to make actual source code modifications to achieve the look you 
desire.

>  We could dabble in the possibility of contributing code to some of these.

	If you want to talk about coding opportunities for Mailman, then 
the mailman-developers list may be a better place to do that.

	Operational questions are appropriate for mailman-users, but if 
you're talking about actual code that you've developed, that's the 
domain of mailman-developers.

>  But any such work would need to be on something reasonably active with a
>  realistic release schedule (we once, many years back, began doing things
>  in Majordomo-2 only for that to stall and stall...).

	Mailman has not been as active as it could be, but with 
additional core developers being brought online, allowing Tokio and 
Mark to focus on the 2.x tree while Barry works on Mailman3, I think 
we've been doing a lot better.

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad at stop.mail-abuse.org>

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

     -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
     Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755

  LOPSA member since December 2005.  See <http://www.lopsa.org/>.