List?

[Garrett Wollman]

<<On Tue, 2 Nov 2021 23:05:41 -0400, Kevin Vahey <kvahey@gmail.com> said:

> Thanks Garrett for getting the jumper cables out

It is still quite likely that this list will not survive the
end-of-life of Mailman 2.

The list runs on software called GNU Mailman.  At some point in the
now-hazy past, the developers of Mailman decided to work on a
different and incompatible mailing-list manager, confusingly also
called "GNU Mailman", and discontinue working on the old Mailman that
everyone still uses.

Another group of developers sprang up to maintain the old Mailman, but
this is not sustainable, because old Mailman is written in version 2
of the Python programming language.  The Python developers decided to
work on a different and incompatible programming language, confusingly
also called "Python", and ended support for the old Python ended in
early 2020.  The packaging system that my server uses officially
deprecated the old Python (and thus the old Mailman) at the end of
last year, and it will be deleted soon.  It hasn't gone away yet (and
in fact there was a security patch applied last month) but at some
point it will in fact stop working, and I do not have the time or the
desire to hack on Python to keep it running.

Different groups have taken their own approaches to the deficiencies
of the various Mailman replacements (all, including the new Mailman,
are missing some essential features).  However, the traffic on this
list is so limited, and most list members are more easily reachable in
some other medium, so I'm dubious that it's worth the effort to
completely replace the mailman installation with something else.  The
fact that I didn't hear from anyone in four months that the list was
broken until Kevin contacted me on Twitter and Paul sent personal
email is an indication of the state of the current level of interest
in the list.

-GAWollman