Richard writes:

 > my big issue about moving on is the apparent necessity of
 > otherwise, for me, COMPLETELY unnecessary use of containerization

Do you mean Python virtual environments?  The container install is a
3rd party configuration.  It happens to be maintained by the Mailman
project lead so it gets mentioned in our documentation, but the
recommended install is virtualenv, not the dockerized one.

virtualenv is NOT a container, it is just an /opt-style install where
all of an application's software and data (including all required
Python packages) are installed under a single directory (instead of
spread all across the universe as in an FHS-conforming layout).  In
theory you might get unnecessary duplication of Python packages, but
in practice most of the duplication is necessary because other apps
requiring the same packages have conflicting version requirements.

And if you're worried about security, new ways to abuse any email
system are being invented every day.  In Mailman 2 plus Python 2, new
vulnerabilities will not get fixed.  I think that opens up much more
risk than containerization does.

 > (Note to newbies;

Not a lot of newbies here.  The newbies are running Discord and Zulip,
rather than mailing lists.

 > ... One day (Turing Award winner) Michael Stonebraker came into my
 > lab (380 Soda Hall, UC Berkeley - before it was reconfigured) with
 > Sergey Brin and Larry Page in tow,

Great story!

 > Later many "AI" researchers came to our lab for a similar
 > dog-and-poney-show dialogue asking if we'd created a "neural net,"
 > as many "AI" research teams did at the time. Instead I cited our
 > R-tree adaptation and said point blank that when you have a data
 > processing need for some form of index, a pointer, to what's needed
 > that doesn't already exist you invent the pointer for the type of
 > data you have.

This drives me nuts, too.  "Bright! New! Shiny! Nonfunctional and
pessimized!"

Have you read Jamie Zawinski's screed about the advantage of Netscape
2's flat-file approach over formal databases for mail reader message
summaries?

Steve

-- 
GNU Mailman consultant (installation, migration, customization)
Sirius Open Source    https://www.siriusopensource.com/
Software systems consulting in Europe, North America, and Japan
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