-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Sorry, I forgot to cross-post this to mailman-users, so I'm reposting. - -Barry
Now that we've successfully navigated the switch to Bazaar, it's time to lay out plans for future Mailman releases. I've talked to several people about what to do about Mailman's future and I'd like to take this opportunity to describe my thoughts and get your feedback. First some background. Mailman 2.1 is (shockingly) four and a half years old, having been initially released on 30-Dec-2002. The last release in the series, 2.1.9 was made almost a year ago. In the meantime, Mark and Tokio have been doing a great job maintaining the 2.1 branch, with several important patches in the tree now that will eventually become 2.1.10. The problem of course is that we can't add any new features to the 2.1 family <wink>, so we should be thinking about a new major release. I've been making good progress on the SQAlchemy/Elixir version, which will finally get rid of pickles and put Mailman on a Real Database (tm). It's been clear to me for a while that this branch will have a unified user database. It simply makes no sense to build the database back-end without once and for all fixing this design constraint. I've always said that the unified user database will be in Mailman 3, and thus this branch is indeed called "Mailman 3.0". I've been slowly building things back up from the ground floor. The basic data model is in pretty good shape and I'm taking a religious test-driven approach to making things work again. But the branch still needs a lot of work, and I have no ETA for Mailman 3.0. In the meantime, Andrew Kuchling and others have volunteered to work on modernizing the Mailman web u/i, and Terri recently started a thread discussing updates to the archiver. I think it makes sense to bless these efforts, towards the goal of releasing them in Mailman 2.2. I intend to create an official Mailman 2.2 branch in bzr where these efforts can land as they mature. My hope of course is that we'll also be able to use much of this new code for Mailman 3. I'd like to keep the changes for 2.2 focused on the web u/i and archiver, with a small number of additional features to be determined. Mailman 2.2 should see no changes to the basic architecture or 'database'; we'll continue to use pickles by default for Mailman 2.2. While I won't rule out other new features, I want to be very picky about those that are accepted for 2.2, and would not feel bad at all if we rejected or deferred until 3.0 most of those proposed. Criteria for other 2.2 features must include minimal code impact with a high degree of reliability and stability. I plan on updating the wiki pages to reflect this thinking, but I would like to get feedback from y'all about the plan. It would be awesome if we could see a release of Mailman 2.2 some time in late 2007 or early 2008. Comments, question? - -Barry -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.7 (Darwin) iQCVAwUBRo/BJnEjvBPtnXfVAQL7iwP/TfPPvMsTnrrSxQAlvPjQoR27ySqUYh+P yZCvGxxp9DgNoFQOWl0mo1QzZ9ozXtiFfIHx4CJLybOis+yuiq+BWtih2MJnGBf7 SzD8qsBOu6N4sE8sn4n0tdmXr1fnh4qnrgTobvBX+3toJtHNGQTEVEZCxiWb5fKq JsUKDVVvOhQ= =CVNK -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- ------------------------------------------------------ Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org Security Policy: http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py?req=show&file=faq01.027.htp