Danil Smirnov via Mailman-Developers writes:
> On Wed, Mar 11, 2026 at 6:18?PM Stephen J. Turnbull
> <[email protected]> wrote:
> > My apologies, I should have removed that task. It was done last
> > summer, but the contributor changed career paths midsummer and
> > hasn't finished the integration.
> I'm sorry, but what does this mean?
Now that I have some breathing room, let me explain what it means.
> Does this mean that any Mailman task unfinished in previous seasons
> goes to a GSoC graveyard where it sits forever, effectively
> blocking any other effort in this direction?
Of course it doesn't. Anybody who is not a GSoC contributor would be
free to pick it up (original contributor has right of first refusal,
but they have to publish a repo which implies GNU GPLv3+, so anybody
else can follow along and pick it up at any time). However, GSoC has
rules prohibiting cooperation among contributors when one person's
work depends on another's. I don't know that continuing a previous
project would violate them, but I'm not real interested in testing it
when there are plenty of greenfield projects. On the other side, I'm
not comfortable asking a GSoC contributor to start from scratch given
that somebody already did most of the work.
> It sounds awful.
Hakuna matata, man. Volunteer open source sucks that way, lots of
people do not finish their projects, but you'll be a lot happier if
you don't worry about that. If you look at the GSoC orgs that
reliably get their projects integrated, they're either the New!
Bright! Shiny! thing of the summer, or the project is basically
somebody's master thesis. Projects like Mailman that are very stable,
just work, and for practical purposes in maintenance mode sadly don't
attract the same kind of enthusiasm from people who have a thesis to
write or a job to go to.
> I hope Mailman is a valuable product in its own right, not just a
> training toy for GSoC students (I don't have anything against GSoC
> in general, though). The most interesting ideas collected for GSoC
> should be implemented, not left buried in the GSoC archives.
Banner seen at the World Baseball Classic:
+----------------------------------+
| |
| Mom! send money or developers! |
| |
+----------------------------------+
I think there are about 10 committers still, but as you know only Mark
and I are active on the lists, and only Mark and Abhilash are doing a
lot of reviewing outside of GSoC. None of us are paid to do Mailman
development, or even get "release time" from our employers from it.[1]
> and we still don't have the "List Configuration Tool" available
> after 3 years, so I suppose I have the right to raise this issue...
You have the right to do (or fund[2]) the work too. The last time I
talked to the contributor he wanted to finish the work, but if I had
an offer I'd talk to him and most likely he'd be willing to let
somebody else finish up. In the meantime I had other things I wanted
to work on, which is, you know, how we volunteers roll.
Footnotes:
[1] OK, Mark and I are now retired, but we do have non-Mailman lives.
[2] Note that funding the work gets you the feature, but it doesn't
necessarily guarantee it gets in to the public distribution. Most
likely work that was solicited for GSoC would get in, but I've seen a
few implementations of solicited features that were "good enough" for
the developer, but unacceptable for some reason to various projects.
--
GNU Mailman consultant (installation, migration, customization)
Sirius Open Source https://www.siriusopensource.com/
Software systems consulting in Europe, North America, and Japan
_______________________________________________
Mailman-Developers mailing list -- [email protected]
To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected]
https://mail.python.org/mailman3/lists/mailman-developers.python.org/
Mailman FAQ: https://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3
Security Policy: https://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9
