On Sun, Feb 5, 2023 at 7:21 PM Kevin Kofler <kevin.kof...@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-...@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-...@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!