The GNOME Project is closing all its mailing lists
- Reference: 1666870392
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2022/10/27/the_gnome_project_is_closing/
- Source link:
The community's leaders maintain a substantial [1]selection of mailing lists, hosted via the GNU Project's [2]Mailman tool. It also hosts its own [3]instance of the [4]Discourse web forum tool, notably also used by Canonical to host the official Ubuntu [5]forums .
That's going to change, and very soon: at the end of this month. Announcements on several of the lists, such as [6]here on the list for the Evolution email client, state that the lists are closing down, and discussions must move to Discourse.
[7]
Former GNOME Project Executive Director [8]Neil McGovern told the Reg:
Like many other projects which use Mailman, we are finding that relying on a Python 2 program is not sustainable.
That suggests to the Reg FOSS desk that the project is running Mailman 2, since [9]Mailman 3 uses [10]Python 3.7 or newer .
To be fair, there has been plenty of warning. The [11]plan was first mentioned in June 2020. The Mozilla Foundation did the same some time ago, and it published [12]instructions on how to access the Discourse groups by email. The GNOME Project also has [13]help for users with visual impairments who use a screen-reader on their computer – notably, the project hosts the list for the Orca screenreader.
[14]
[15]
GNOME Infrastructure Team Coordinator [16]Andrea Veri told us:
Since we introduced Discourse, GNOME's Mailman instance has seen a decline in utilization over the past years. The new platform offers way more features than Mailman, including gamification which newer generations, in general, appreciate, but also markdown support, RSS feeds, proper spam support, multiple authentication types and so on and so forth.
He also mentioned reducing fragmentation of the GNOME communities, along with improved integration, such as a bridge to Matrix for live chat. The move is part of a general modernization of the GNOME Project's infrastructure, which has also seen a move from IRC to Matrix and from cgit to GitLab.
[17]Laugh all you want. There will be a year of the Linux desktop
[18]GNOME hits 43: Welcome To Guadalajara
[19]Ubuntu 22.10 is out, with an extra remix in the family: Unity
[20]Disentangling the Debian derivatives: Which should you use?
This vulture wasn't a participant in any GNOME-hosted list, but remains an enthusiast for mailing lists in general, plain-text, bottom-posting, and all – even the flame wars. The author is seeing steadily declining traffic levels on a number of lists, and it's a worrying [21]trend . Mailing lists do still have an important [22]role to play… for now.
Get our [23]Tech Resources
[1] https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo
[2] https://list.org/
[3] https://discourse.gnome.org/
[4] https://www.discourse.org/about
[5] https://discourse.ubuntu.com/
[6] https://mail.gnome.org/archives/evolution-list/2022-October/msg00128.html
[7] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/oses&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2Y1qrGqOJWVTZyhQKItXsFAAAAEs&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[8] https://blog.halon.org.uk/about/
[9] https://wiki.list.org/Mailman3
[10] https://docs.mailman3.org/projects/mailman/en/latest/src/mailman/docs/install.html
[11] https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/Initiatives/-/issues/18
[12] https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/how-do-i-use-discourse-via-email/15279
[13] https://discourse.gnome.org/t/welcome-to-gnome-discourse-screen-reader-users/11678
[14] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/oses&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44Y1qrGqOJWVTZyhQKItXsFAAAAEs&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[15] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/oses&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33Y1qrGqOJWVTZyhQKItXsFAAAAEs&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[16] https://wiki.gnome.org/AndreaVeri
[17] https://www.theregister.com/2022/10/14/year_of_linux_desktop/
[18] https://www.theregister.com/2022/09/22/gnome_43_is_here_soon/
[19] https://www.theregister.com/2022/10/20/ubuntu_2210_kinetic_kudu/
[20] https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/18/disentangling_the_debian_derivatives/
[21] https://lwn.net/Articles/768483/
[22] https://lwn.net/Articles/702177/
[23] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
"bottom-posting"
"bottom-posting"?
Shurely you mean "interleaved replying", that was (and is) half the point: first trim out all unnecessary quoted text, keeping only the part(s) that you are directly replying to (or replacing with a [one-liner paraphrase] if not really replying to any specific text in the message in particular), and reply underneath each respective part in turn, so that it is clear which part you are responding to. Quoting an entire message and replying underneath it (something that sadly seems to be becoming increasingly prevalent on some forums as well, grrr) is really just as bad as retard-quoting (where the quoted slug trail was left later in the message than the reply text)…
For a moment...
I read that as "The GNOME Project is closing".
For one... glorious... hysterically happy moment.
Discourse is weird
We now live in a world where (pretty much) everyone has always-on internet access, not charged per minute, so it probably does make sense to move from mailing lists to some sort of forum, where it is easier to follow/bookmark and respond to only the threads of interest to you (rather than wade through an overflowing mailbox, or spend hours honing procmail rules or slrn scores (half of present day devs now say, "Huh?" here)), and to look up older discussions when these contain nuggets of useful information (trying to search back through mailing list archives is never quite as easy).
But I have to say that while the Stack Exchange format is very useful, I'm no fan of Discourse. There's something 'one layer removed' about it, where it tries to be too clever-clever by suddenly suggesting jumping to other replies while you are reading through a thread, with no sense of the flow of the conversation, or what you might be missing out on if you do jump to later (would you actually be missing any important intermediate replies that might be relevant to the particular information you were trying to find or discuss?) and similar 'scatterbrain' functionality. Maybe I just don't quite grok it, but there's just something about it that makes me feel very uncomfortable.
Re: Discourse is weird
> move from mailing lists to some sort of forum, where it is easier to follow/bookmark and respond to only the threads of interest to you (rather than wade through an overflowing mailbox, or spend hours honing procmail rules or slrn scores (half of present day devs now say, "Huh?" here)), and to look up older discussions when these contain nuggets of useful information (trying to search back through mailing list archives is never quite as easy).
Whether it's in a web forum or a mailing list, the data being processed is pretty much the same, so the issues you're encountering aren't to do with the medium of transmission, but with the client UI being used.
Has there really not been much effort put into list-specific mail clients, or to functionality specific to mailing lists? Over so many decades? Or do people just not realise that there is any other way to read email than the inbox-firehose model offered by Outlook Express and Gmail?
Re: Discourse is weird
Has there really not been much effort put into list-specific mail clients, or to functionality specific to mailing lists? Over so many decades? Or do people just not realise that there is any other way to read email than the inbox-firehose model offered by Outlook Express and Gmail?
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but email is a dying technology (along with telephones) You may love your RFC 822 SMTP, but the younger generation aren't into it.
Re: Discourse is weird
E-mail threads are normally all I need to keep track of any discussion.
"The GNOME Project is closing all its mailing lists"
A more cynical view is that it could perhaps reduce the opportunity to raise concerns about bugs, interoperability with extensions, overall direction of the GNOME Project, etc.
modernism... web browser or its trash
"The move is part of a general modernization..."
And by modernization you mean to put everything into a web browser right?
Matrix isn't an IRC replacement, it's an ICQ replacement. Discourse is kind of an IRC replacement but again, more of an ICQ replacement.
If the functionality of Matrix and Discourse have to remain seperate... ICQ was waaaaay ahead of the curve. Of course it wasn't in a web browser so it was trash?
I like Discourse, I don't use it, but when I have it's good at being what it is (just not my thing). Matrix I used once and laughed at.