[Openmcl-devel] mailing list migration

[R. Matthew Emerson]

openmcl-devel at clozure.com <mailto:openmcl-devel at clozure.com> will be retired soon.  Its replacement is a new list, ccl-devel at clozure.com <mailto:ccl-devel at clozure.com>.  Your subscription will not be automatically moved over. If you wish to subscribe to the new list, you can do so by sending mail to ccl-devel+subscribe at clozure.com <mailto:ccl-devel+subscribe at clozure.com>.

For more details, read on.

This mailing list, openmcl-devel at clozure.com <mailto:openmcl-devel at clozure.com>, has been managed by the Mailman program for many years.

Mailman 2, which is what we’ve been running, requires Python 2.  The Python developers quit working on Python 2 in back in January 2020.  Instead of porting Mailman 2 to Python 3, the Mailman developers decided to create Mailman 3, which is quite different from Mailman 2.

At the moment, Python 2 is still available for easy installation on FreeBSD and probably some other systems, but they are warning that it is deprecated, and at some point, they will stop providing it.

So, I’ve decided to try using new mailing list management software, namely mlmmj (http://mlmmj.org <http://mlmmj.org/>).

Here is the plan.

I have created a new mailing list ccl-devel at clozure.com <mailto:ccl-devel at clozure.com>, managed by mlmmj.  You have to subscribe to it anew by sending mail to ccl-devel+subscribe at clozure.com <mailto:ccl-devel+subscribe at clozure.com>. [1]

List archives for the new list will not be immediately available, but will be in the near future.  I will also make the old Mailman list archives conveniently accessible somewhere.

For the moment, the way to subscribe and unsubscribe to the new list is by sending it email.  There is a simple web-based front end for subscribing and unsubscribing that I will make available when the list archives become available.

I hate to have to do this, because it takes up time I’d rather spend on something else.  Renaming the list is probably going to be disruptive as well.  But I feel that I have to do something to get off Python 2.



1. There is no technical reason I couldn’t automatically add all current subscribers, but I don’t feel like that’s appropriate.  I would rather have people take explicit action.