terriko

I'm happy to say that...




Mailman 3.0 suite is now in beta!

As many of you know, Mailman's been my open source project of choice for a good many years. It's the most popular open source mailing list manager with millions of users worldwide, and it's been quietly undergoing a complete re-write and re-working for version 3.0 over the past few years. I'm super excited to have it at the point where more people can really start trying it out. We've divided it into several pieces: the core, which sends the mails, the web interface that handles web-based subscriptions and settings, and the new web archiver, plus there's a set of scripts to bundle them all together. (Announcement post with all the links.)

While I've done more work on the web interface and a little on the core, I'm most excited for the world to see the archiver, which is a really huge and beautiful change from the older pipermail. The new archiver is called Hyperkitty, and it's a huge change for Mailman.

You can take a look at hyperkitty live on the fedora mailing list archives if you're curious! I'll bet it'll make you want your other open source lists to convert to Mailman 3 sooner rather than later. Plus, on top of being already cool, it's much easier to work with and extend than the old pipermail, so if you've always wanted to view your lists in some new and cool way, you can dust off your django skills and join the team!



Do remember that the suite is in beta, so there's still some bugs to fix and probably a few features to add, but we do know that people are running Mailman 3 live on some lists, so it's reasonably safe to use if you want to try it out on some smaller lists. In theory, it can co-exist with Mailman 2, but I admit I haven't tried that out yet. I will be trying it, though: I'm hoping to switch some of my own lists over soon, but probably not for a couple of weeks due to other life commitments.

So yeah, that's what I did at the PyCon sprints this year. Pretty cool, eh?

I should write up a proper trip report with pictures and stuff, but as it's nearly midnight and I don't want my sleeping patterns to stay on California time, you get some short highlights:

1. The conference itself was awesome. Recall: I attended the sprints last year but not the main conference, so while I had high hopes I didn't know that the content would be so good. I attended a lot of great talks and no doubt missed quite a few as well. I'll be making heavy use of the conference recordings over the next little while, I expect.

2. I am really excited about my free raspberry pi. While I know lots of folk who frequently get given cool toys and told to go hack them, this is the first time someone has gifted me with such an item/mission, and it feels great. I haven't figured out what I'm going to do yet, but there was this great talk about hooking one up to a $300 CNC machine, and another great one about home automation that could be useful...

3. The sprints were super-productive! You can see our todo/completed/waiting list here if you want the nitty gritty. I'd been joking earlier to anyone who asked that we were totally going to release by Friday, and while we didn't do that, we *are* very close and you should all expect a beta release of postorius + Mailman 3 very soon. I can't wait to show it off!

4. Perhaps later I'll do up the stats on exactly what I was doing to our repository, but I should tell you that not only did I make plenty of my own code commits, but I also got to merge code from new contributors. This was totally my favourite part, seeing new folk get their code accepted and in the main tree. And it wasn't just the people who were physically at the sprints with us: I also merged code from people contributing remotely, most of whom are prospective GSoC students. Way to impress me, students!

5. I got to talk to a bunch of people about GSoC. I do this all the time by email, but it was especially fun to talk to folk in person about what's involved, why it's awesome, how to be good at it, and why they should sign up.

6. And post-con, I got a few days to catch up with friends in the area and visit the Japanese Tea Gardens in Golden Gate Park, which I've wanted to do ever since I read Seanan Mcguire's October Daye books. As I processed a few photos for this week's assignment, you get one here:



And with that, midnight has rung and it's bedtime. I have a long week of catch-up ahead of me at work, but expect some more pycon / mailman / gsoc posts out of me over the next little while as I internalize all the things I've been thinking about this past week.