I'm just a site admin who
uses mlmmj on several domains, so I can't speak to the maintenance
issues but only as a user of mlmmj:
I've recently looked at other mailing list options (again) and I
still find nothing with the same level of flexibility and ease of
use, in terms of managing several lists on a domain and being able
to write basic PHP to manage the lists per my own needs.
Compared to Mailman... well there is no comparison - I'd rather
use mlmmj every time.
mlmmj can be a bit difficult to install, given the sometimes terse
and incomplete documentation, but once it's working, it IS a joy
to work with.
I too have been concerned that it appears there's been no activity
recently, but until it breaks or some email security paradigm
shifts and makes mlmmj un-safe to use, I'll still be a fan, and
I'll still recommend it to others. I'm not surprised to hear
adoption is currently going up.
It might get even more adoption if it appeared it was being
maintained currently. I realize its easy to say this from a user
perspective; I'd be happy to help in some way if my skill-set
would be useful, but I don't have a deep knowledge of email
systems.
It would be a great shame to see such a well-structured mailing
list app fade into history.
just my two cents.
Philip
On 1/21/2021 2:35 AM, Chris Knadle
wrote:
Today
I was contacted and asked about the status of mlmmj upstream
because from the point of view of the outside world it looks dead;
the mailing list archive stopped working in Dec 2017, there's no
new commits to the Mercurial or Git repositories since 2017, and
thus no indication that MLMMJ is "alive".
I happen to be on the mlmmj "discussion" mailing list because I
maintain the 'mlmmj' package in Debian, so I took the time to read
through the "Is this list active? Where is "upstream"??" and
similar threads, and I see that there's a Git repo fork at
https://gitlab.com/mlmmj/mlmmj and had a look at it ... but nobody
from the outside world can see that this exists, because that repo
is not mentioned on the website nor the mailing list archives.
From the distribution point of view this appears to be "dead
upstream" and is a reason for package removal. Debian is about to
do a "soft freeze" for preparation for the next release whereby
packages in the archive will need bug support for 3 years.
The main thing I want to know is "what should I do about the
release?"
I'm considering the following choices:
a) release 'mlmmj' as before, with myself as maintainer of the
package.
b) orphan the package so that there is no listed maintainer,
where the package
might be released with Debian 11 or might get dropped,
depending on what
the Release Team decides about the package themselves
c) request removal of the package from the archive
Choice "a)" only fits if someone in "upstream" is willing to try
to fix bugs that get reported. Are there others helping with this
at present?
Right now I'm uncomfortable about this because the GitLab repo
can't be found from the mlmmj.org web page, and that repo seems to
be where bugs are reported and handled lately, as best I can tell.
Is that correct?
Side note: In terms of chances of bugs needing upstream help,
looking at the Debian "popularity contest" figures I see that the
number of users reporting having mlmmj loaded is low but slowly
going /up/, which is good but not what I expected to see. (Note:
these "popcon" numbers are likely artificially low, because not
all machines are set to report popcon data to Debian.)
https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=mlmmj
Choice "b)" seems the most reasonable to me under the
circumstances, but puts the package at risk of removal. This
option does not preclude me from continuing to help fix bugs on
the package as a "non-maintainer", which is what I would intend to
do, for as long as I still use the package.
I'd like to hear other's thoughts about this so we can discuss it
some.
Thanks.
-- Chris