META: Upgrading newsgroup infrastructure

[Russ Allbery]

Hi all,

I've been putting off upgrading the mailing list server that hosts the
list version of this newsgroup for far too long, enough that it's blocking
a couple of needed major operating system upgrades that will also affect
the infrastructure for running this group.  I'm hoping to finally tackle
that this weekend.

Unfortunately (and this is why it's taken so long), this requires a major
change to the mailing list software from Mailman 2 to Mailman 3.  The old
software is end of life and no longer supported, and Mailman 3 is
substantially different, mostly in ways that I'm not that excited about.
I did some research into possible alternatives, and this still seems like
the best approach that doesn't require I put more effort into this than I
have readily available, but there will be a few annoyances.

The main annoying changes are:

* The archives are... weird.  They're a bit more like a message board than
  a mailing list archive, they don't use a fixed-width font (although I
  will look again if that's configurable once I get the migration done and
  can upgrade to the latest version), and there are upvotes and downvotes
  and other things like that which seem rather pointless to me but that
  don't seem to be configurable.  All of the archives prior to this
  cutover will also continue to be available in the old format, but going
  forward new messages will be only archived in the new system (called
  Hyperkitty) because the old stuff has to go away since it requires an
  unsupported version of Python.  The new archive does offer an mbox
  download of messages, so at least in theory you can still download the
  message and view it in a regular mail client, and of course the regular
  mailing list function of sending you the messages will work as always.

* The new web site interface really wants you to create an account to use
  it.  I would rather that you not have to do that, and I definitely don't
  want to have even hashed versions of any important passwords, so if you
  create an account, please use some password you don't use anywhere else.
  You can still subscribe to the list without creating an account, but
  unsubscribing from the list without creating an account can only be done
  via email.  I think this is a poor design choice, but it doesn't appear
  to be configurable.  You can always mail racc-leave at lists.eyrie.org to
  unsubscribe (after the cutover) without having to create an account, or
  just mail me directly if all else fails and I'll try to find your
  address and remove it.

I will also have to do some major surgery to make the integration with the
newsgroup work properly.  I think I've figured out how to do that;
hopefully it will work.

I'm planning on doing this upgrade during this weekend.  During that time
period there will be a lot of outages, a lot of software in motion, and
probably a few bugs and unforseen problems.  Apologies in advance for the
disruption, and make sure you keep anything you're posting over the
weekend so that you can resend it if needed.  I will send the all-clear
when I think everything is working.

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)             <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>