[Mailman-Users] Thoughts about migrating to Mailman instead of Sympa (from Majordomo)

[Geoff Mayes]

Hello Mailman gurus,

I hope a general question about Mailman's features and future direction (along with some Sympa comparisons) are appropriate for this list.

The University of Oregon is migrating away from Majordomo.  We decided on Sympa because Mailman sends passwords over email while Sympa provides centralized (e.g. Shibboleth, LDAP, etc) authentication.  If Mailman provided a way around the passwords in the clear issue, I'm pretty sure we'd go with Mailman because:
- Mailman is more thoroughly used and thus tested (one stat that gets at this is Alexa Traffic Rank: 165,692 vs 749,729 for Sympa)
- Mailman is more mature (the max bug ID for mailman in its issue-tracking system is ~913,400; the max bug ID for Sympa is 8,117 and there is still no bug category for Sympa's latest version -- 6.1.7 -- even though it has been out for over 4 months)
- Mailman has greater branch stability and code reliability (I noticed that Barry ran a pre-checkin acceptance suite for the Postgres patch for Mailman 3 before he checked it in)
- Mailman has a bright and well-documented future (Mailman 3 and its bug tracker, source code, milestones, etc)
- Mailman has a more active and supportive community, which is very important in resolving future issues (Mailman had 150 list postings in December and through mid-January while Sympa had 44; I've been impressed with Mark Sapiro's responsiveness on this list)

Does anyone know a way around the emailed passwords issue in Mailman, clever hacks, certain plugins, or a timeline for Mailman 3's release?  I've written a number of Django apps using my own LDAP module, so I was also wondering if folks think now is a mature-enough time to perhaps grab Mailman 3, its Django front-end, and hack together what I'm after?  A final, random question: Mailman 3 is still in alpha, but is it stable given that it's almost been in alpha for 4 years?

Many, many thinks for any help, pointers, or information,

Geoff Mayes