Subject: [alpine-devel] Alpine Linux infrastructure: communication

From: Natanael Copa <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 06 Mar 2009 13:52:28 +0100

I'd like to tell what we have regarding communication and what we need.

Mailinglists
============
Nathan Angelacos is responsible for this. It works good I think. We need
mailing list archives that are public visible/serachable badly.

Nathan: could you please take care of this? I think this is more
important thatn setting up a bugtracker (which Carlo is helping me with)

Do we want a user support mailing list? I think we are big enough for
that now.

Email hosting for alpine staff
==============================
Do we want to have alpinelinux.org email addresses for the alpine linux
staff? I originally thought that it is not necessary and I use my gmail
address. However, it might be useful for signing things with pgp. It
also give a more official impression than using gmail.

On the other hand, its a pain to have multiple email addresses.

What do you think? Can we sign packages, emails, tags with an
non-alpinelinux.org address or should we give everyone an
alpinelinux.org address? If so, do we have any volunteer to deal with
this? (I think its me who manges alpinelinux.org MX atm)

IRC
===
We have 2 official channels. #alpine-linux and #alpine-devel on
freenode. Carlo Landmeter is responsible for this and is doing a great
job there. Thanks alot.

I got an email from freenode about registering alpinelinux. It was
rather long so I think I will just forward that to Carlo and he can read
and tell if I need to do something.

Forums?
=======
Do we want forums? I havent used anyforums for a long time and I dont
really like forums. However, if you guys think that setting up a forum
will help us build the alpinelinux community and if there is someone who
whats to manage forums (we could always find someone to host it and set
it up) then please step up. Otherwise I think we wait with it.

I think I'll mention bugtracker in separate email.

Thanks!

-nc

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From: Carlo Landmeter <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 6 Mar 2009 17:37:17 +0100

> I'd like to tell what we have regarding communication and what we need.

Like i have suggested before, maybe it a good idea to setup
alpinelinux mx on google apps? This way you have an easy interface to
manage your members and its easy for them to exchange information (not
only email). If we would manage this ourselves it would request
additional time which we should spend on other things, and if people
don't like gmails interface and tools they can use pop/imap to
retrieve. I know we need our own dog food but I'm not sure how far you
want to go with this.

> it up) then please step up. Otherwise I think we wait with it.

The current project status doesn't request for this because most of
our user base has a technical background regarding Linux. If you would
like to attract "newbies" forums are a good place to start. If you
look at recent MIPS projects, they attract a lot of end users who like
to hack on their wireless router/nas. These users prefer easy
information access and end up using the forum.

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From: Nathan Angelacos <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 07 Mar 2009 21:36:12 -0500

> Mailinglists

Status update.

First the bad news.  The old archives appear to be MIA, so it looks like 
archives only go back to July 2008.  :(

Next the ugly news.  Mail archiving looks ugly.

We can try to use an outside service: http://www.mail-archive.com/

Other mail archiving looks like it wants to use mbox format (mlmmj looks 
like it uses a modified maildir format, which is more sane, IMHO)

MHonarc (http://www.mhonarc.org) is perl

hypermail has compile/packaging issues

lurker (http://lurker.sourceforge.net) is the nicest, but is c++ WITH 
python!

Still working on hypermail - but it will need tweaking.

For "outside the box" thinking... if you want mail list *search* and not 
  just threaded views - there is namazu (www.namazu.org).  It should do 
a good job for reporting searches, but won't present a threaded view.

So, I guess I'm interested in knowing... what are the features that you 
view are necessary for the mail archives?  (besides the obvious we don't 
lose any more...)

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From: Timo Teräs <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 08 Mar 2009 10:55:02 +0200

> view are necessary for the mail archives?  (besides the obvious we don't

I think threading and monthly indexes are pretty important. Searching is
nice but not must.

Many projects have just threaded indexes. Sometimes the searchable
archives are hosted somewhere else. Or maybe just outsource hosting
to google? Let it index the mail archives and make a search box google
search that limits the search to our site.

Generally I'm pretty ok with Pipermail. E.g. see busybox or asterisk
archives. But if someone needs searching then it's not enough.

- Timo

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From: Nathan Angelacos <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 10 Mar 2009 16:44:05 -0400

> archives. But if someone needs searching then it's not enough.

http://willow-lists.tetraec.net/

hypermail, with custom stylesheet; Not "live" yet- would like to put it 
on lists.alpinelinux.org (but that will need an update to 1.9.x)

Thanks to mike mason for getting hypermail compiled!

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From: Nathan Angelacos <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 10 Mar 2009 16:45:42 -0400

> http://willow-lists.tetraec.net/

err.. http://willow-lists.tetrasec.net/

I kan't zpell

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From: Natanael Copa <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 11 Mar 2009 08:36:21 +0100

> err.. http://willow-lists.tetrasec.net/

w00t!!!

If we get more than 2000 messages in the archive we might want to have a
look at:
http://www.hypermail.org/hypermail-faq.html#7

But for now... good enough! (100 times better than nothing)

So we need to
* upgrade lists.alpinelinux.org to 1.9.x
* set up hypermail there too
* tell google to index it

I think I could have a look at upgrading lists.alpinelinux.org

> I kan't zpell

welcome to the club

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From: Carlo Landmeter <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 9 Mar 2009 08:20:05 +0100

> Help:         [email-masked]

m0n0wall also has a simple ml interface in php, I think the project
owner wrote it himself. It uses google to search.

http://m0n0.ch/wall/mailinglist.php

If needed i could ask the source.

We could also use google groups:

http://groups.google.com/groups/create

(just thinking out loud)

carlo

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From: Natanael Copa <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 11 Mar 2009 20:21:01 +0100

> http://groups.google.com/groups/create

Just so you don't think I don't consider google groups. It is a news
service, NNTP. There are some other projects there (Gentoo stuff for
example) but those are there via an NNTP/mail gateway I assume.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NNTP

we could ofcourse setup a news/mailing list gateway but I don't think
its worth it.

-nc

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