Received: from mail-qt1-f172.google.com (mail-qt1-f172.google.com [209.85.160.172]) by nld3-dev1.alpinelinux.org (Postfix) with ESMTPS id E0988780ED1 for <~alpine/devel@lists.alpinelinux.org>; Sat, 18 Apr 2020 14:56:09 +0000 (UTC) Received: by mail-qt1-f172.google.com with SMTP id l13so4642606qtr.7 for <~alpine/devel@lists.alpinelinux.org>; Sat, 18 Apr 2020 07:56:09 -0700 (PDT) DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha256; c=relaxed/relaxed; d=gmail.com; s=20161025; h=date:from:to:subject:message-id:in-reply-to:references:mime-version :content-transfer-encoding; bh=hPrejnAF+dJ2aQve/iEa55zqchiol+tJhOwHa/ccef4=; b=uLxTcdRuNjQT44HD1jqIXPjdrBczH/kaO+xOx75TZ/HN/iKBRXwzj+Qt5Fhp7M1rZa XBTS4MOba15UEKpbuSN6OL2kigbRnVvCkE7eBw07V+msb6Zpz58qfI5u0wSe7TOX6vKw y16BUBs73LuRSnJ3fHI/UdvTBQohfxrHcp8p0ItP7ITm+dcQZM8Pm7wA+Ti/Ps5lrH8p MKi23GdvXQXENvzwT9loaInq9leHT0dpOS+aObAtCO7YEj0/GUX4MRj+Z3vGfOfT1u35 WKK3JZcIMrYSG5uZOs+QW5MEfHZIyuQTE2fXrdN0ApP8GOP249inzwyCpGO5ymm/PdS1 ugZw== X-Google-DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha256; c=relaxed/relaxed; d=1e100.net; s=20161025; h=x-gm-message-state:date:from:to:subject:message-id:in-reply-to :references:mime-version:content-transfer-encoding; bh=hPrejnAF+dJ2aQve/iEa55zqchiol+tJhOwHa/ccef4=; b=ajwsm+UB9m1MFi0hPytqW8olF4BkWNKZZSZQWdPm94oOLj5FjR65XSRam+vgDLbKWs HO2RiERynFKo651V144s5lERiUsfa8K4+jc7Kqh3/6yqcv7At8tIazW5R+tvUc3DUJHy ouPNbXLXVvJqdh2G/muaIko3s2xZNYK81+o7B6DE/wcvbghtDlPbYq9x9dg+X2aC/I+w MbolPcm9J6wz4S+//S6fqZG49CQ1o3l0HYNXqAiQ0GKO0u/ja9s9Ja+Pb+cV1UEhY0vJ jhSkVnns694gp6kgKytkv9MZT8KMflpoPt4SHM0LRRaEWUU8txNm4sUUmOBQ3wSAJgmZ qafA== X-Gm-Message-State: AGi0PuZyYd4ZQfb5yPhB3emGCgl2I7F0XIWLcTR2S/iqKgvzRYid5U43 6Y9h3OnSD7GAjKoispc7xfYnfyYlJLw= X-Google-Smtp-Source: APiQypKpRyYuiRyhc/qkKJgu3smYkPnunQxaCdm10K3LeIV4ViKStex3+C827XZ9FLlPuICKcWJeOA== X-Received: by 2002:ac8:193d:: with SMTP id t58mr7766096qtj.93.1587221767815; Sat, 18 Apr 2020 07:56:07 -0700 (PDT) Received: from enterprise ([2804:431:cfcc:87e0:246f:3be8:dfd:9ae1]) by smtp.gmail.com with ESMTPSA id u11sm7681895qtj.10.2020.04.18.07.56.05 for <~alpine/devel@lists.alpinelinux.org> (version=TLS1_3 cipher=TLS_AES_256_GCM_SHA384 bits=256/256); Sat, 18 Apr 2020 07:56:07 -0700 (PDT) Date: Sat, 18 Apr 2020 11:55:08 -0300 From: Leo To: ~alpine/devel@lists.alpinelinux.org Subject: Re: mailing lists, processes, modernization Message-ID: <20200418115508.73b3f2de@enterprise> In-Reply-To: <66694f73048e047cadbe9e3f715801d8@dereferenced.org> References: <66694f73048e047cadbe9e3f715801d8@dereferenced.org> X-Mailer: Claws Mail 3.17.5 (GTK+ 2.24.32; x86_64-alpine-linux-musl) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit On Sat, 18 Apr 2020 03:48:25 +0000 "Ariadne Conill" wrote: > Hello, > > When Alpine was first started, we had a single mailing list, > alpine-devel, which was running on ezmlm. This served us well for > many years, but a few years ago, we started to realize that we needed > to modernize the software being used in order to mitigate various > security and spam issues with the ezmlm setup. > > This lead to Drew DeVault proposing that Alpine use his Sourcehut > platform for mailing lists, which we have used for the past 8 months. > Initially, this was seen as a good solution for the original > problems we were having with the ezmlm-based setup, but some have > discontinued using the mailing lists, in some cases leaving the > project entirely due to issues the Sourcehut software has processing > HTML e-mail, which caused incompatibility with popular e-mail clients > such as the Android GMail client and the iOS EMail client, as well as > differences in behavior verses the earlier mailing list system > involving the Sourcehut solution not mailing a copy of the message > back to its author. > > The reduced participation on the mailing lists, and thus reduced > adherence to procedure for coordinating system changes have reduced > its usefulness as single source of truth for tracking system changes. > > Unfortunately, this brings us to a crossroads: mailing lists that are > boycotted by participants are not a useful communications tool for a > project, because of the source of truth issue. In addition, the infra > team has expressed a desire to migrate all applications they manage to > run under Docker, a desire not shared by Drew for the Sourcehut > infrastructure. > > Since adoption of the Sourcehut mailing list platform, we have also > implemented GitLab as a Git forge. GitLab features high quality issue > tracking and integrates with e-mail. This leads us to my proposal to > replace development mailing lists with GitLab issues and merge > requests. > Correct me if I'm wrong (hopefully I am wrong), but e-mail integration is only for Enterprise Edition. > Initially, we discussed the aports mailing list. This has been > deprecated and replaced with the new mkmr tool[1]. Many users are > now using the mkmr tool and that effort has been considered largely > successful. > I'm the author of the mentioned tool and i can say it has basic functionality mostly working (with a few quirks), you can create (mkmr), merge (mgmr), and edit (programmatically and interactively, edmr, vimr) a Merge Request's attributes. There are a few things missing that are super useful for people used to SourceHut and E-Mail workflow in general: - List Merge Requests open - Comment on Merge Requests and its threads (also resolve them) - List changes of a merge request before merging - Checkout a merge request in a local branch There is also no tooling to deal with issues (comment on an issue, open/close an issue) When the above are complete people will be able to have a decent to good experience contributing to Alpine Linux with only a CLI > So, now we talk about alpine-devel. In most cases, it is believed > that change proposals could simply be tracked and commented on by > filing issues against the aports project in GitLab. For larger > meta-issues, it is proposed that we create a project for meta-issues. > This replaces the working side of alpine-devel with a more efficient > workflow and restores the single source of truth for system changes. > > For the support inquiries that get sent to alpine-devel and > alpine-user, I propose that we use Discourse forums instead. > Discourse is more accessible to the average user, featuring mobile > apps and tons of features. Discourse also supports e-mail for people > who still desire to interact with the system using e-mail, but the > support is limited to replying and creating new threads. This is > believed to be adequate for die-hard e-mail users, however. > About the email support, i don't see that as a big problem since that is basically what e-mail can do at all > That leads us to decommissioning of the Sourcehut platform. We need > some mechanism to maintain the list archives for historical reasons, > as the mailing lists served as a single source of truth for a long > time. As the Sourcehut software is a mostly typical Flask > application, it seems plausible that we could write a script to dump > the mailing list archives as static HTML pages. The Sourcehut > software could then be decommissioned, and maintaining the mailing > list archive would be of minimal impact to the infra team. > > Thoughts? > > Ariadne