About the Mailinglist debacle...

Hello,

So now that everything is working… sorry for the mess.

We should have left the gforge infrastructure the last time we had a multi-day problem,
not wait till we get it again.

I think this will be my new principle: second real problem -> I leave. No discussions.
We already saw with the jenkins story just how deadly bad infrastructure is.

So what happened was that last Tuesday, the lists (all lists of gforge) stopped delivering.
Why is not clear, seemingly it was not gforge itself but the upstream servers  did
not deliver. Whatever.
What is clear is that it was completely unclear how long this would take, and that we
needed a solution after nearly a week of waiting.

So we decided to move the lists. Of course with the old lists down, this was harder than
normal (even involved parsing the html to get the subscribers…) but that is not important.

Now the problem its hat Mailman does not distinguish between people that unsubscribe,
and those turning off delivery. So there where just a lot of people listed with "nomail (U)",

What to do? It was clear that we can't just subscribe lots of people to a list that they *actively*
unsubscribed. So the only option was to skip those by
        -> unsubscribing them from the old list
        -> then get the list of subscribers
        -> put that in the new list.

The only people that will see a bad effect are those using e.g nabble to read the list. But those
would see the new mails, too. The only problem they have is if the want to send. So not *that* of
a big deal.

It seems that we got quite some false positive subscribers anyway in the form of people who filtered
the mails and then with the new list the filter did not work and they suddenly saw mails of a long forgotten
list. We even had the case of people who where "nomail (U)", yet they did get mails delivered. How
that can possibly work, I have  no clue *at all*.

What else is missing (and on my TODO since Sunday/Monday, sorry for not yet acting on it):

        -> lists.pharo.org has an empty page and needs to point to the list of the lists inttead
        -> the archive needs to be moved from the old jenkins.
        -> the (incomplete) archive of the new lists is not working since I put it as public.

So… maybe it would have been better to just wait until gforge works again and then move… but
it was just far too long already and not clear when it would be working again.

        Marcus