Carl Zwanzig writes: > On 4/10/2019 11:36 AM, Dimitri Maziuk via Mailman-Users wrote:
> > (That said, given the history of python, my question would be if there > > are any plans to port MM2 to golang or maybe gnat.) Not within the Mailman project. It seems pointless to me. If you want something that's never going to change, Python 2.7 is as good as anything else. Python 2 will still be alive in 2030, I'll bet. The security issues ... if Mailman 2 running on Python 2 in a VM is a security problem for you, Mailman is the least of your security problems. #opsec #apt And I'm sure somebody (though not the Python project itself) will still be doing patches and backports, which for most of the security issues I've seen (I'm NOT an expert yet) seem to be more straightforward backports than dealing with text (ie, you don't have to worry about charsets and anything unexpected may be considered hostile and quarantine is the right thing to do). > Or rust, or python3 (which might be the easiest). I'm not > sufficiently up on the python differences, but..... it can't be > -that- difficult..... Yes, it can. For about 10 years, the most popular kind of bug in Mailman 2 was a UnicodeError that bubbled up to the top, resulting in a message shunt at best. Porting from Python 2 to Python 3 will almost certainly open that window again. I suspect the same is true of porting to any language with the internal string encoding being Unicode, but I don't have experience with rust or golang. This wasn't a problem in Mailman 3 because we simply rebuilt everything from the ground up, and it's much easier to do things right (ie robust and resilient handling of fuzzbombs from spammers and Japanese highschool students who write their own MTAs). > The main thing is that from appearances MM3 is large > enterprise-grade list manager, So is MM2. MM3 just tried to make it much easier to "have it your way" on admin and archiving. This did not work out as planned. It turned out that many of the "volunteers" who wrote Postorius and HyperKitty were actually working for Red Hat who needed enterprise- grade features. On the other hand, most SMEs and social groups trying Mailman 3 seem fine with the industrial-strength architecture, and have neither tried to build their own front ends, nor asked that we do it. > but many of us don't need that, we need something for a few (<100?) > lists with a few (<500?) members. I can run that on a small BSD > box; If reducing heavy dependencies is the goal, it shouldn't be that hard to write a MM2 clone web interface, reusing most of the screens. So I don't think a port of the MM2 admin interface to talk REST to MM3 core would be hard. And as Mark says, if your users are old enough, they can use the mail admin interface a la majordomo. :-) I'm pretty sure there was some work done on porting Pipermail to MM3 (it would still run on Python 2 though, but that port shouldn't be terribly hard). > Maybe there's a place for a community-driven port of MM2 onto > python3. I don't think that's a good idea. I'll be happy to kibbitz if somebody wants to try it -- it's not a *terrible* idea. But I think coming up with downsized web admin and archive applications is a better one. Steve ------------------------------------------------------ Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: https://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org
