Mailman3

Purpose

Purpose of this investigation is to find potential ways to migrate the CentOS mailing lists to mailman3 from the current solution and allow for a frontend. The output of the investigation is this document.

Resources

Investigation

Here is the list of ideas/things we discussed/looked at:

Conclusions

Based on the investigations carried out the most beneficial but probably most difficult solution would be to build the rpms for mailman3 hyperkitty and postorius for epel. This would make this available for Centos but could also be used by fedora which could help with some longstanding issues such as https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure/issue/5478.

The installation using containers would address the issues of compatibility and push them upstream but it also brings the problems of relying on an upstream maintainer who is not a part of our community.

When installing with pip and venv similar problems are encountered as with rpm where dependencies are not available or up to date in the fedora or stream environment.

Adding Centos mailing list to the fedora server would be a quick fix but doubles down on using the fedora setup which itself in not in perfect health. It would also involve some issues with naming as the centos mail list uses centos.org rather than lists.centos.org

Proposed Roadmap

  1. Package mailman3-core postorious and hyperkitty for epel. This requires python3 base

  2. Deploy a server using the above packages.

  3. Convert all email addresses to users. This will involve comms as emails may not directly relate to fas users.

  4. Integrate with Accounts sso. This may potentially force mailing list users to have an account with Fedora/Centos which was not a rule up to now.

  5. Import all archives/lists. This may require an outage as any pending subsriptions or emails won’t be carried across.

  6. Assign correct owners to lists. Currently in CentOS this is just controlles by passwords