mailman 3 on FreeBSD- or mailman replacement?

[Greg Veldman]

On Wed, May 13, 2020 at 09:48:38AM -0500, Valeri Galtsev wrote:
> Dear All,
> 
> I'm sure I'm not the only one who runs mailman on FreeBSD servers. Now 
> that python 2.7 is about to go, mailman 2 will follow. There is mailman 
> 3 that is based on python 3. There is, however, no mailman 3 port. I 
> wonder if someone already asked mailman port maintainer about mailman 3. 
> I do not like to bother busy person(s) if someone already did.

I was typing a reply to this when I saw Matthew's note come in,
I can't add anything to what he said so I won't try. ;-)

> I kept repeating to people I work for who start using python as 
> significant part of their work environment: Python is a sneaky snake. 
> Namely, python paces fast with changing internals version to version 
> (meaning minor versions here, not only major one). Thus, variety of 
> modules one starts using have to keep up, but some may lag behind, then 
> one may get stuck to older version of something, forcing older version 
> of everything. Not to mention this whole thing being update nightmare. 

One could say the same thing of virtually any software written
in virtually any language.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_rot.  It's a real
thing.

Though to be fair to Python, I also run several sites based on
the Django web framework, including some that are fairly complex,
utilize a lot of packages for Django, and have significant local
development efforts invested.  In the Python3 line, I've not yet
had a version upgrade that was anything more than a drop-in
replacement.  The major issue between Python2 and Python3 is
they changed the way strings are represented internally, and it
turns out that's a fairly important change for a software package
that processes email messages all day...

> This all leads me to my second question: maybe it is time to replace 
> mailman with some other maillist suite. If someone already made this 
> decision, could you share the reasons, and your new choice:

I said this in the other thread the Matthew mentioned, but if
I had to switch off of Mailman to something else, in my mind
Sympa looks like the best option currently available, based on
my own personal criteria (which I won't get into here).

-- 
Greg Veldman
freebsd at gregv.net