[Mailman-Users] Now that Python 2 is dead in 2020 what are people's plans with mailman2?

Mark Sapiro mark at msapiro.net
Wed Apr 10 12:25:37 EDT 2019


On 4/10/19 8:36 AM, Matthew Goebel wrote:
> 
>   Now that all support for Python 2 is supposed to go away in 2020 are
> people going to move
> off of mailman 2?  I've been looking at mailman 3 and finding it hard to
> grok after using
> mailman 2 for many years.  I haven't seen a discussion about this so I
> thought I would
> check and see if people were willing to share their thoughts.


Coincidentally, I was asked off list just yesterday

> Could you share
> how long in months/years can we expect to continue to have Mailman 2.x
>  patches/updates without having to move up to version 3.x?

My answer was:
------------------------------
Official Mailman 2.1 support should have been abandoned before now, but
I am compulsive about a lot of things, and it is difficult for me to
ignore bug reports.

Consider that Mailman 2.1 is implemented in Python 2 and see
<https://pythonclock.org/>.

I can't answer your question with an actual time frame.

1) I could get hit by a bus tomorrow.
2) I'm 77 years old and in good health, but I won't live forever.
3) Something in between.

Of course, as long as you are running on a platform that supports Python
2.7, you can continue to use Mailman 2.1, and if it works today, it will
probably still work tomorrow.

But some time this year, I will release Mailman 2.1.30 and that may well
be the last official release.

On the other hand, my work on Mailman 2.1 is in large part driven by the
community, so we'll have to see.
------------------------------

Some of the @python.org lists (not this one yet) have been migrated to
Mailman 3 and new lists are Mailman 3. There are already 73 Mailman 3
lists @python.org (there are still 313 MM 2.1 lists).

Some of my bicycling club's lists have been migrated and there is one
that was MM 3 from the start, but there are two that are still MM 2.1
because of ancillary processes that are blocking the migration.

Also, there are MM 2.1 features not yet supported in MM 3. I miss
regular_exclude_lists and the ability to 'invite' members. There are
also settings that are in MM 3 core, but not yet exposed in Postorius
which makes some things difficult for list admins who don't have shell
access to the server.

These things will come, but we are a small team and most of us have a
$dayjob. We welcome help. Check out our trackers at
<https://gitlab.com/mailman>, and if you can submit merge requests, that
would be great.

The path forward is to increase the community of MM 3 users which will
result in more people contributing to the project and faster progress.

Of course, I'm in a unique position as both a MM 3 developer and
essentially the last person supporting the official MM 2.1 branch, so it
would be interesting to get other people's views on this.

-- 
Mark Sapiro <mark at msapiro.net>        The highway is for gamblers,
San Francisco Bay Area, California    better use your sense - B. Dylan


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