Email server update - migration from Mailman 2

[Neal Gompa]

On Sun, Feb 5, 2023 at 7:21 PM Kevin Kofler <kevin.kofler at chello.at> wrote:
>
> Ben Cooksley wrote:
> > The most likely candidate for this is naturally Mailman 3 (an instance of
> > which can be found at
> > https://mail.python.org/archives/list/python-dev@python.org/)
>
> This already shows one of the issues: The archive links contain unescaped e-
> mail addresses which get mangled by third-party mail filters such as the
> Gmane one, breaking the links.
>
> > It appears to be a substantial improvement in all regards over Mailman 2,
> > and therefore I intend to upgrade to that at this stage.
>
> Unfortunately, there are several usability issues with the Mailman 3 archive
> interface, known as HyperKitty. Fedora (the GNU/Linux distribution) was one
> of the first projects to switch to it (and it was originally developed by a
> Fedora developer), so I have run into a bunch of them. There was
> unfortunately little to no interest in fixing them when I reported them.
>
> The worst was that indentation in the mails was completely lost. Though
> looking at the Python 3.12.0 alpha 2 announcement:
> https://mail.python.org/archives/list/python-dev@python.org/thread/M2ZJ3BAPJKVLU3XUTFEQXTNQOOJWWZRT/
> (hoping the link will not get mangled), at least this seems to have been
> fixed. The indentation still looks wrong though because the mails are
> displayed using a proportional font rather than a fixed-sized one as in
> Pipermail (the Mailman 2 archive interface).
>

Most people expect normal proportional fonts when reading mail, not
monospaced text. Even my email client doesn't show email in monospaced
text by default.

> Time stamps use strange formats. The front page shows me time stamps of the
> form "Di Nov 15, 2:02 nachm.", which is not a valid way to format times in
> German. (We do not use 12-hour times in Austria.) I did bring that to the
> attention of the (at the time) main HyperKitty developer when this was
> deployed in Fedora, but it does not seem to have been addressed. Somebody
> filed a bug asking for the time format to be configurable, also mentioning
> this issue:
> https://gitlab.com/mailman/hyperkitty/-/issues/357
> and it has been open mostly untouched for a year and a half. Also, a request
> to always show the date next to the time was simply turned down:
> https://gitlab.com/mailman/hyperkitty/-/issues/299
> which is IMHO also a usability regression compared to Pipermail.
>
> And finally, HyperKitty is largely unusable without JavaScript. If you turn
> off JavaScript, significant portions of the interface just do not work,
> whereas Pipermail was completely free from client-side code. This is a
> regression in browser compatibility and in accessibility. HyperKitty also
> uses cookies, Pipermail does not.
>

This is an unreasonable demand. Most of the internet does not function
without JavaScript today.

> > - Mailman 3 uses a completely different URL format, so existing list
> > archive links will likely be broken. It may be possible to retain static
> > copies of the existing Pipermail archives to mitigate the impact of this
> > but they won't be updated any further following the upgrade.
>
> Broken links sound like a showstopper to me. Either keeping the static pages
> up or somehow setting up a redirect mapping (I believe it has been done at
> least once by some project, but it does not seem to be currently deployed in
> Fedora at least, they are using what I assume to be a static copy of the old
> archives) is IMHO required.
>

openSUSE developed a way to map legacy discussions on mlmmj to
HyperKitty, while Fedora just retained the old Pipemail static pages.
Either works.


-- 
真実はいつも一つ！/ Always, there's only one truth!