Thank you, Steve, for your thoughtful and measured reply. I have a
clearer picture of the ramifications of Jim's proposal, to the degree
that he has specified it. The longer the thread festered, the fewer
salient points were made, so I can't say that I support it or not.
But it's not my call in the first place.
I'm glad you have no quarrel with me. I am merely a Mailman admin
with no control over any of my installations. I hope that by the time
my ISPs drop MM2, there will be ample tools to make the conversion to
MM3 relatively painless. Despite an exhaustive search, I can find no
suitable and affordable alternative.
BTW, the original Rexx interpreter was written in IBM Assembler
(proprietary), Regina in C (GPL), ooRexx in C/C++ (CPL), NetRexx in
NetRexx(!) (CPL), and BSF4ooRexx in ooRexx (CPL/AL). There has been
no "branching" whatsoever. Yet there is a lively cross-platform
collaboration when issues arise, from architecture down to patch. And
yes, sometimes it can get testy. ;-)
Thank you for you patience. I consider this matter closed.
-Chip-
On 8/30/2020 1:29 AM, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
I wrote a long screed, full of piss and vinegar. But on reflection,
clearly nobody is reading what I wrote earlier, so let's try pithy and
dry. It's still long. :-(
Chip Davis writes:
> OK guys, what's really going on here?
I don't know. I can tell you I'm done with Jim. You'll have to ask
him about what he thinks is going on.
I have differences of opinion with you and Carl, but no quarrel.
> Is this about turf?
Not on our side. I have genuine concerns. In Mark's most recent
post, he writes:
> We only asked that these potential new members actually ask to join
> the GNU Mailman project as members.
That doesn't look like a concern with turf to me. Mark may not have
the same concerns I do, or any at all, I don't know. We'll have to
wait until he gets back. In the meantime, I'll lay out mine.
> Is there something about Jim's proposal that requires resources
> (money, proprietary code, prestige, etc.) from the GNU Mailman group?
Mailman is a GNU project. Under the GPL, Jim's proposal *needs* no
resources from the GNU Mailman Project, and no blessing from us,
either. He has the code, and the physical resources are easy to come
by elsewhere.
Certainly it makes economic sense to use the existing repository and
other project resources to support further Mailman 2 development. It
won't cost Mailman 3 or the Mailman Project anything to share. But
nobody else has any *right* to any of those resources, and especially
not to the time that Mark and I devote to user support. If you think
otherwise, you are wrong both as a matter of law and as a matter of
free software philosophy.
In this connection, Carl Zwanzig writes:
> it's vastly different to say "Pay no attention to that GPL,
> no one is allowed to maintain or improve that code."
That's incoherent. The complaint is that people *are* maintaining and
improving the code, but we don't allow them to use our resources and
reputation to distribute their code. That complaint is groundless.
It is fully within the GPL, letter and spirit, to refuse to distribute
code, whether others' or our own. The spirit of the GPL is that you
can use your own resources to distribute both your code and ours.
Just ask politely, and if you want my support for you to freely commit
to and distribute from the project's Mailman 2 branch, I ask you to
commit to providing support for all its users.
Or don't commit to serving users, just don't free-ride on the Mailman
name and you can have my support. That was the idea of my original
request to Jim.
Back to Chip:
> [Are you] genuinely concerned that the continued viability of MM2
> would be a threat to MM3[?]
Brian may be, and I'd like to hear why. But at present I am not.
My concern is that a small group of highly competent power users will
take over the Mailman 2 repo, Mark and I will disengage from this list
and Mailman 2 bug channels, and support for ordinary Mailman 2 users
will go in the toilet because the new team is focused on developing an
EOL application in an EOL language, not on user support.
> I have a little experience [with multiple "branches" of REXX] here.
With all due respect, I don't think it's relevant to what Jim has
proposed so far. There's a detailed explanation in the "screed", but
the gist is that Mailman 2 and Mailman 3 use completely different
architectures and interfaces, so expertise simply doesn't transfer
between them. Of recently active developers only Mark and I have
experience with both code bases, and I at least want to wash my hands
of Mailman 2. AFAICS, the developer teams will have little to talk
about with each other.
As far as the communities go, perhaps we could work together somewhat.
We have a common history, we support the same kind of admins and list
users, there's going to be movement across the Mailman 2 vs. Mailman 3
boundary. We share the goal (for us, secondary) of providing good
day-to-day support to folks still using Mailman 2.
But all Jim has proposed so far is to commit and distribute his team's
patches. I don't mean to be unnecessarily unpleasant: that's a fact.
You've all paid lip service to the Mailman 2 community, but are you
committed to community support? Who's going to moderate this list?
Who's going to be here day in and day out answering both interesting
bugs and boring FAQs? What is to be done about users whose preferred
distros EOL their Mailman 2 packages?
> I can see that it won't immediately lift the entire burden of MM2
> off of Mark's shoulders,
As far as Mark is concerned, Mailman 2 is EOL. So it's an objective
fact that this change doesn't lift burden, it *adds* burden: new code,
new questions, new bugs, new releases.
The question is whether Mark will feel free to quit supporting Mailman
2. I sure will -- there will be a new maintainer to point users at.
> simply declaring EOL on MM2 and leaving thousands of admins in the
> lurch.
Mark has already declared EOL a couple of times, although in practice
we (that includes you folks on an as-available basis, tyvm!) continue
to support it. There is no "lurch". But I do not believe that the
"thousands of admins" want new development. What we see day in and
day out are admins happy with Mailman 2 as it is, but they want help
with upgrading from source or spam filters, etc.
As far as I can see, where Mailman 2 EOL pinches is a smallish number
of power users who would like to use our resources (repo, mailing
list, and maybe our pipeline to distros) to share patches as did the
legendary Apache HTTPd dev group. Nothing wrong with that. We're
discussing it right here.
But understand that we have a reputation to protect. Understand that
we don't want to be spammed by Mailman 2 users who aren't getting the
help they need from the new dev crew. And understand that we want
those users to get a semblance of the support we currently give them,
but believe we could not give if we were doing active development on
Mailman 2 at the same time.
> What am I missing?
A Mailman 2 branch open for development.
It should be clear at this point what directions discussion might go
to get my support. You'll have to ask Mark about his desiderata when
he gets back. Abhilash and the others will likely go with what Mark
and I recommend, but we'll see when the time comes.
Regards,
Steve
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