Hi,
It's been announced that Debian Buster will be released in the beginning of July. While there's no immediate hurry to upgrade, there's definitely one good reason to start working on an upgrade: Python 2 will be completely decommissioned in 2020 and our mailing list infrastructure runs on Mailman 2 which runs on Python 2.
Debian Buster includes the new Mailman (Mailman 3) -- which runs on Python 3. Mailman 3 isn't just an upgrade to Python3, but a complete re-architected Mailman. Mailman consists of 4 independent applications in version 3. One of those is the mailing list archive manager.
Since we'll need to migrate our old mailing list archives to this new infrastructure (and preferably keep the URLs stable), the migration may be quite a bit of work to prepare. So, I'm looking for people who can help out: find out which *exact* steps we have to go through to get minimal downtime on an upgrade and get back to a stably running system on return.
Comments? Volunteers? Proposals?
Sorry about the late reply.
Since we'll need to migrate our old mailing list archives to this new infrastructure (and preferably keep the URLs stable), the migration may be quite a bit of work to prepare. So, I'm looking for people who can help out: find out which *exact* steps we have to go through to get minimal downtime on an upgrade and get back to a stably running system on return.
The mailman archives are currently split up by month.
If the same is true with MailMan 3 as well, how about creating/importing the mailing lists as a parallel structure in MailMan 3 and, with a month switchover, switch the postfix routing to MailMan 3?
As a second (independent) step we can Redirect the HTTP URLs for new archives to the new (parallel) location. (And find some way to merge the new and old Archive pages, but that might "just" be a perl script).
I'm proposing that because I've known someone who did a mailman switchover in the past (though not 2=>3), and it was a real PITA to keep the URLs stable. (Not sure whether they ended up with a big Rewrite table?!).
This here sounds like a least-risk solution -- we can even have postfix deliver mail to _both_ mailman installations at the same time, to be able to switch back as a fallback path.
Erik Huelsmann ehuels@gmail.com writes:
Since we'll need to migrate our old mailing list archives to this new infrastructure (and preferably keep the URLs stable), the migration may be quite a bit of work to prepare. So, I'm looking for people who can help out: find out which *exact* steps we have to go through to get minimal downtime on an upgrade and get back to a stably running system on return.
Comments? Volunteers? Proposals?
I looked into this. The manual seems to provide the needed steps:
http://docs.mailman3.org/en/latest/migration.html#upgrade-strategy
What is suspicious is that they could not package this into a script, and could not keep themselves from breaking the archive URLs.
This footnote is disconcerting:
http://docs.mailman3.org/en/latest/migration.html#id1
What I would like to do is get the archives and configuration files, and write a script (probably a makefile) that does the import and updates to the old HTML pages, and see if any of the potential problems come up in any of the lists, and if there is an automated way to deal with them. The script can then be used for the upgrade.
-- Vladimir Sedach Software engineering services in Los Angeles https://oneofus.la
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Erik Huelsmann -
Philipp Marek -
Vladimir Sedach