[Savannah-hackers] Re: Mailing lists migration

[Roland McGrath]

Ok.  It's not made very clear on the site which method of
contacting you is preferred.

So, I sent mail to address@hidden about this for the hurd lists.  I
presume that gets to the same place as all the mailman addresses for the
"gnu central" lists.  But I don't even know what human(s) that is.

As to the general question, I have a few thoughts.  

1. It seems to me that for a large number of lists the project association
   is obvious, i.e. when there is a foo project on savannah it seems pretty
   damn safe to automatically associate the lists {info,bug,address@hidden
   with it.  At least that one heuristic could be done entirely
   mechanically and would probably cover a few dozen lists.

2. What I really had in mind when I said "a general plan" was just a
   semi-automated conversion strategy like you had for the cvs repository.
   That is, you and/or the main mailing list maintainers do a quick eyeball
   pass through the lists of mailman lists and savannah projects, making
   the associations you think off hand are right.  Then you mechanically
   send email to all the project admins with the set of mailing lists and
   ask them to send you positive confirmation and/or corrections.  It
   doesn't seem like much work at all to collate these lists and generate
   all the email messages (any volunteer with half a clue could do the
   collating in an hour).  The work would be in processing all the responses.
   If instead of requesting email response, you included a handy URL on
   savannah for the project admin to indicate his approval of each list
   assocation, then there would be no flood of email responses to handle.

3. This issue seems useful to address with an ongoing feature, not just for
   the initial migration.  I would like to see a feature whereby a project
   admin using the "attach mailing list" could check a box instead of
   supplying the mailman admin password, and this would submit a
   notification to the mailman admin for the list in question.  Then the
   list admin would process these project-association requests similar to
   subscription requests for closed lists, which I assume involves
   following some URL in the notification email and just clicking an
   approve button.  The complementary feature also seems useful, i.e. allow
   a mailman admin to "pre-approve" a project association such that the
   project admins get a notification including a handy URL that takes them
   through the "attach mailing list" form to make the association happen.

With this latter part of #3 completing the feature, then you could execute
the entire initial migration from the list of guessed assocations, acting
either as the mailman admin or as the project admin.  This would leave the
final approval step to whichever of these admins you are not, which is just
what you want.