Re: [Dotgnu-sc] Status of dotgnu.org

[Norbert Bollow]

David Sugar <address@hidden> wrote:

> Could some of these Mailman enhancements be contributed back as enhancements 
> for mailman currently?

Right now Mailman is feature-frozen as the maintainer is busy
with working towards a stable release of Mailman 2.1 (currently
in beta) and with a seemingly never-ending stream of maintenance
releases to correct problems with Mailman 2.0.x

Also this stuff really isn't as grand as it may sound at first.
I have some plans for some really meaty Pipermail enhancements,
but right now I have neither the time to implement them myself
nor the resources to hire someone to do it.

So going the way via contributing to the Mailman project is not
likely to be possible as quickly as I'd like the move away from
dotgnu.info to take place.

(BTW even where my changes are not yet worthy of inclusion in
the official Mailman release, they've already been
copyright-assigned to the FSF. :-)

Greetings, Norbert.

> Some of them certainly sound useful, and perhaps that 
> would be the better answer.  There sounds like some possibilities where 
> mailman gets some improvement and pipermail gets resurrected, and this seems 
> something the fsf could possibly also find useful to run locally and have 
> benefit for many more users.
> 
> On Saturday 27 July 2002 04:29 am, Norbert Bollow wrote:
> > > Meanwhile, do we want to import the dotgnu.org mailing lists into
> > > gnu.org?
> >
> > Let's discuss what will be best.
> >
> > I'd be happy to continue hosting the lists, but I think moving
> > them to a FSF machine would be a good idea since that would
> > allow GNU volunteers (who are not employees of my company) to
> > work on it, if/when that is desirable.  (I have a policy of not
> > giving shell access to a production server to anyone who is not
> > directly related to my company.)
> >
> > On the other hand, I don't like the idea of moving to a vanilla
> > Mailman version, especially with the archives.  Since the
> > beginning of DotGNU we've had searchable archives, and also
> > I've made the small modification to the archives that gives us
> > the capability to add logos and a legal disclaimer to the
> > archives.  I don't like the idea of losing these features.
> >
> > Also, as soon as the website redesign (which has been making
> > good progress now with the fine work of Rich) is complete I'd
> > like to modify the archiver to generate matching archives.
> > (Perhaps I should also mention that my business plans involve
> > hiring a maintainer for Pipermail, the archiver component of
> > GNU Mailman, which currently is sadly unmaintained.  The
> > original author of Pipermail has declared the package
> > "obsolete" and deprecated it in favor of a different archiver
> > which is also Free Software but written in Perl, which makes
> > it unsuitable for close intergration with Mailman which is
> > written in Python.)
> >
> > So if/when we move the DotGNU lists to a FSF server, I'd like to
> > be able to admin the archiver system there - would this be possible?
> >
> > Now IF we move the DotGNU lists to a FSF server, and IF also
> > dotgnu.org gets transferred to the FSF soon (as we all hope)
> > then we'd be in the nice situation of being able to choose
> > between two good options.  I'd be in favor of moving forward
> > with turning both of those two IFs into realities (without
> > losing features), and change the lists to use gnu.org or
> > dotgnu.org according to whatever of the IFs gets done first.
> > (I'd like to move away from .info as soon as possible while
> > minimizing the number of changes and while not losing those
> > nice features).
> >
> > > If someone sends us the mailman directories, we can probably do
> > > this.
> >
> > I can easily provide a .tgz with them, and/or install things,
> > I'm experienced with those things :-)
> >
> > Greetings, Norbert.
>