The GNOME mailing lists are hosted on menubar.gnome.org, using the Mailman. The GNOME mailing lists website is at: http://mail.gnome.org. All the public lists are listed at http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo.
For new list requests, please see NewListRequest.
We are running the Mailman 'post-only' patch, so if you think you have important mails for lists you don't subscribe to, of the type that won't wait for the list moderator to approve it, then please subscribe to the list. One of the list admins will consider your subscription request for approval.
We use 'mhonarc' for the list archives, as it's a whole load better than the standard mailman archiving. Unfortunately, this breaks the archive links from the list info pages (known problem/todo).
We use 'Namazu' for searching the list archives. Seems to do a good enough job, although it's a bit broken at the moment. The indexes have fallen out of date, been half-rebuilt (reindexing keeps crashing) and new posts are still not being automatically indexed. It's currently in need of some attention.
In case of any mailing list related problems, please contact 'mailman@gnome.org', or 'gnome-infrastructure@gnome.org'.
How it works
We use a custom RPM, currently based on the Fedora Core 5 mailman RPM, but including a couple of patches. Currently, Kurt and Ross are responsible for keeping this up-to-date with any relevant security errata. Mailman is 'pinned' in RHN, so it is *not* automatically upgraded when security patches are available.
All major list maintenance is done as the 'mailman' user on menubar. Just use sudo -u mailman ... to run the mailman admin utilities.
The mhonarc scripts we use are kept in sysadmin CVS in the 'mhonarc' module, and are documented in the README there. They are run from /home/admin/mhonarc. The web archives are kept in /mail/list-archives/private, with symlinks for the public lists set up in /mail/list-archives/public. The public directory is served up as http://mail.gnome.org/archives/.
The namazu scripts are now in sysadmin CVS in the 'namazu' module. They run from /home/admin/namazu. They are configued in /etc/namazu. The indexes are in /var/lib/namazu/public-index and /var/lib/namazu/private-index. Currently, there does not appear to be a mechanism in place for keeping the indexes up-to-date.
Renaming lists
Sometimes a project will change names and want the names of their lists changed too. This happened when 'gnomemeeting' changed name to 'ekiga'. This is the best way I could come up with to handle it:
Create the two new lists:
/usr/lib/mailman/bin/newlist ekiga-list /usr/lib/mailman/bin/newlist ekiga-devel-list
Save the configs of the gnomemeeting-* lists:
/usr/lib/mailman/bin/config_list -o /tmp/x gnomemeeting-list /usr/lib/mailman/bin/config_list -o /tmp/y gnomemeeting-devel-list
Edit them with vi/sed, check etc.
Feed them back in as the ekiga-* list configs:
/usr/lib/mailman/bin/config_list -i /tmp/x ekiga-list /usr/lib/mailman/bin/config_list -i /tmp/y ekiga-devel-list
Copy the subscriber lists over:
/usr/lib/mailman/bin/list_members -r -f -p gnomemeeting-list | \ /usr/lib/mailman/bin/add_members -w y -r - ekiga-list /usr/lib/mailman/bin/list_members -d -f -p gnomemeeting-list | \ /usr/lib/mailman/bin/add_members -w y -d - ekiga-list /usr/lib/mailman/bin/list_members -r -f -p gnomemeeting-devel-list | \ /usr/lib/mailman/bin/add_members -w y -r - ekiga-devel-list /usr/lib/mailman/bin/list_members -d -f -p gnomemeeting-devel-list | \ /usr/lib/mailman/bin/add_members -w y -d - ekiga-devel-list
Still haven't thought about the best way to deprecate the old lists, or whether or not it would beneficial to copy the list archives across, or leave them where they are. In the meantime, I've set up aliases so list posts get forwarded to the new lists.
Plans for improvement
Get namazu hooked up to scan for recent changes (perhaps every 3-4hrs, do 'find' in the archives and feed that into namazu to update the indexes). See SysadminToDoList.
#388961 - mailing lists quality initiative
