[Savannah-hackers-public] Re: Mailman upgrade

[Karl Berry]

    example, Karl mentioned a Mailman feature to clean-up old requests,
    but nor Sarge not Fedora 4 include it yet.

Personally, when it comes to our own software, I think we should run the
latest versions released by GNU, not the versions as packaged by Debian
or whomever.  I don't mean replacing their version of /bin/ls and the
like (that would be crazy), but installing the latest releases under
/usr/local or other non-system locations and using them from there when
appropriate.  As it would be for mailman.  Why should our mail setup be
dependent on what Debian has managed to package?

(I've set up my own systems like this for many years, so crucial system
services are not impacted by os packagers' decisions.)

    I did so for removed mailing lists (~500 msgs), and also removed
    held messages under an old format (files in *.txt) back from 2002
    (~6000 msgs).

All to the good.

    I also noticed that you see the "pending queue [...] with some
    information missing" only once. 

Ah, very interesting.  I hadn't realized that.  So that should make it
no problem to delete the old msgs.  I think we should.

    Last 6 months of all held messages represent more than half of all
    held messages actually, so maybe it's not as useful 

But still very useful.  I strongly think we should go ahead and delete
them (after saving a copy of course).  And might as well cron the
find+curl commands to do it, since it's easy enough to do, instead of
accumulating more months of old msgs.  Ok?

   1634 a2ps

I'm baffled by this one.  When I go to
http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/admindb/a2ps there are no pending messages.

    we always get thousands of held messages at once,

We can think about strategies to reduce this, and the overall load on
the system, but it's a long-term project.  Meanwhile, getting rid of the
ancient cruft in the queues will only help, seems to me.

Thanks much,
Karl