[plug] Mailing list changes

[James Henstridge]

On Sun, 12 Oct 2025 at 14:47, Gregory Orange via plug <plug at plug.org.au> wrote:
>
> Great news, thank you Ben, Nick, Tim and I imagine a humble James since he is the spokeperson here!

I forgot to also include Harry McNally in that list, who has also been
active helping out in the most recent attempt at the server migration.

If you're interested, we've been using Ansible to manage the
configuration on the new server, using a playbook we've been
developing here:

https://github.com/plugorgau/plug-services

This gives us the ability to reproduce much of the configuration on a
new server, and to test out changes before rolling them out live.

> Tech debt is decided unsexy to deal with, but great when it's done - even partially. Any bets on which year the energy will be available to get to mailman v3? Then we can conquer the world!

The old server was running an embarrassingly old version of Debian, so
I wanted to keep the scope of the upgrade limited to something that
was realistically achievable.

Mailman 3 is not exactly a simple drop-in replacement for Mailman 2,
as it relies on a database to store list info and archives. So it
seemed better not to tie this migration to the larger upgrade.

It wasn't without its pain points, since Mailman 2 is no longer
packaged in Debian 13, due to the removal of Python 2. So we're using
the Python 2 packages from Debian 10, and a backport of the most
recent 2.1.x release of Mailman.

I would like to get us upgraded to Mailman 3 so we can drop these
obsolete packages. We've now got a solid foundation for that work.

James.