Re: [libreplanet-discuss] list setup

[Dmitry Alexandrov]

bill-auger <bill-auger@peers.community> wrote:
> On Sat, 23 Feb 2019 15:11:34 +0300 Dmitry wrote:
>> So there are two options:
>
> i will suggest a third option, as i did on the new trisquel
> "General Free Software Talk" web forum which is actually backed by the
> 'freedom-misc' mailing list, and apparently serves very much the same
> purpose as this list, both practically and semantically, but apparently
> gets far more use than this list - i suggest that is not because
> trisquel users do not care to interact with the greater free software
> community, but could be simply because it is a web forum and many
> people prefer that these days
>
> so a very reasonable third option that would unite the community general
> discussions, would be to upgrade this list to mailman3 which has web
> integration
>
> https://trisquel.info/en/forum/connect-web-forum-list-libreplanet-instead
> https://listas.trisquel.info/mailman/listinfo/freedom-misc

Well.  I meant only options that address the issue directly and are quickly 
doable — like switching off an offending toggle, not something that might take 
a good year.  :-)

However, that indeed looks like a great idea: both to upgrade in general, and 
to start from @libreplanet.org prior to (sooner or later) approach much 
higher-volume @gnu.org lists.

Let me share some concerns, though.

One is Mailman itself.  I am not quite sure, that its web interface is 
implemented in a sane way.  At least, its NNTP gateway is not.

Namely, it has an obnoxious habit of _rewriting all message ID’s_, for no 
particular reason I can imagine.  Check the hell that is going on, say, at 
mozilla-support-firefox@lists.mozilla.org, as it presented by:

— Mailman NNTP: nntp://news.mozilla.org/mozilla.support.firefox
— Gmane:        nntp://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.mozilla.firefox.user

Mailman is broken, Gmane is not (in a sense that it does not rewrite any ID’s, 
all is as if you’re subscribed by yourself; as of now that group is also 
stalled, but that is not the point).  Yet both halves of subscribers: a one 
that is uses Mailman gateway either directly or indirectly (groups from there 
are propagated all over the old federated Usenet) and another that is not — 
both are affected by annoyances: depending on how your UA is aggressive on 
threading, you will either see randomly broken threads or numerous allegedly 
lost messages.

Another possible negative consequence of a future upgrading I am afraid of, is 
that listmasters will either forget or decide that is no longer feasible to 
publish its full and uncrippled archives <ftp://lists.gnu.org>.

> and entice trisquel to close it's "General Free Software
> Talk" forum and ask users of that forum to use the web interface of this
> list instead, or vice-versa

Their list’s web-interface looks nice on a first glance (yet it hardly more 
usable than the proper mail interface, of course).  How is it implemented?  It 
does not seem to be an aforementioned Mailman 3.  I am confused, as there is no 
usual link to sources in footer, neither anything related on 
<https://devel.trisquel.info>, as far as I see.  Don’t you know?

> or otherwise use the same back-end mail
> store for both lists

If the task is merging userbase of two existing lists (and not centralising 
everything on FSF infrastructure ;-), is not it easily solved by subscribing 
both one for another, I wonder?

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