[lxc-users] Upcoming migration of linuxcontainers.org mailing-lists

[Stéphane Graber]

Hello,

As part of moving some of our services to newer infrastructure,
consolidating things where they make sense and in general reducing the
amount of time I need to spend maintaining things, the
linuxcontainers.org mailing-lists will soon be migrated over to Google
Groups.

linuxcontainers.org has been a Google Workspace domain for a couple of
years now and all e-mails in and out of our mailing-lists were already
routed through Google's SMTP infrastructure with mailman used at the
mailing-list engine on our end.

As I'm re-deploying all linuxcontainers.org services on new hardware
and upgrading to more recent Linux distributions, I was left with the
following options:
- Keep lists.linuxcontainers.org running on an older distro to keep mailman2
- Bite the bullet and go through a full migration to mailman3 (which
for just 3 mailing-lists looks very difficult)
- Move to an alternative solution

As we're already using Google for all e-mail delivery and the existing
Google Workspace plan I'm using includes the full version of Google
Groups, that seems the easiest approach, completely eliminating any
need for maintenance.

I've already migrated a couple of lists I used to host over to it and
have been able to successfully do it while retaining the entirety of
the mailing-list archive.
I intend to do the same for the linuxcontainers.org lists, effectively
stopping e-mail delivery to the lists, transfer the existing archive
over to Google Groups and then move all members over.

For existing members, this should be pretty seamless with the main
difference being for new subscribers where
https://lists.linuxcontainers.org will now send people to Google
Groups for membership management and for access to the archive. To
avoid breaking all links on Google, I'll keep a static version of the
old mailing-list archive online at their current URL so that any link
to them will keep working in the future.

I expect the transition to happen over the next week or so. I'll be
replying to this e-mail once it's all done.

Thanks!

Stéphane

[Narcis Garcia]

I will not subscribe any service that implies accepting Google TOS.

If you need mailing list infrastructure, please ask for it and I'll be
happy to serve them (and from an LXC environment!).
I have also a wizard to export & import mailman2 lists with full
properties and full data.

To have been using Google already is not an argument, when users didn't
know and accept this. The best move is to go out of GAFAM; It's for
people's freedom and independence, the heart of free~libre technologies.

Regards;
Narcis Garcia

El 8/4/21 a les 4:59, Stéphane Graber ha escrit:

> _______________________________________________
> lxc-users mailing list
> lxc-...@lists.linuxcontainers.org
> http://lists.linuxcontainers.org/listinfo/lxc-users
>

[lena]

On 08/04/2021 08:47, Narcis Garcia wrote:
> I will not subscribe any service that implies accepting Google TOS.
>
> If you need mailing list infrastructure, please ask for it and I'll be
> happy to serve them (and from an LXC environment!).
> I have also a wizard to export & import mailman2 lists with full
> properties and full data.
>
> To have been using Google already is not an argument, when users didn't
> know and accept this. The best move is to go out of GAFAM; It's for
> people's freedom and independence, the heart of free~libre technologies.
>
>

+1

[Serge E. Hallyn]

On Wed, Apr 07, 2021 at 10:59:07PM -0400, Stéphane Graber wrote:
> Hello,
>
> As part of moving some of our services to newer infrastructure,
> consolidating things where they make sense and in general reducing the
> amount of time I need to spend maintaining things, the
> linuxcontainers.org mailing-lists will soon be migrated over to Google
> Groups.

Not asking you to do this as google groups sounds like the least
amount of work, but did you consider going to something based
on the lore.kernel.org software?

I mean meh - we're not using the lists much, but we'd have more
of a sense of community if we used email more, and lore, by
letting you download any thread .mbox I think makes that much
better than dealing with something like mailman.

[Stéphane Graber]

You're obviously welcome to unsubscribe but for what it's worth,
subscribing to a list managed by Google Groups does not require a
Google account nor does it ever ask or implies that you're accepting
any ToS (I just rechecked the test subscription e-mails I have here).

The instructions we'll put in place at
https://lists.linuxcontainers.org will cover how to subscribe and
unsubscribe using e-mails alone, so you won't ever need to go on any
Google hosted site if you don't want to.

I did consider looking for someone to operate the lists separately or
to migrate to another solution but this still makes things difficult
for a few reasons:
- We have private security mailing-lists for embargoed issues which
we wouldn't want someone else to have easy access to.
- We need to be able to easily handle GDPR and similar requests
ourselves across all services running on linuxcontainers.org.
- We care about our mailing-list archives and not breaking any links
so need to keep hosting lists.linuxcontainers.org itself ourselves at
least for the next few years, though the current plan is to our
existing static web servers.

It's certainly important to us that our subscribers can keep using
those lists exactly as they have today with the only change being that
to subscribe/unsubscribe, you'll need to email the +subscribe or
+unsubscribe e-mail addresses rather than use the mailman web form.

Stéphane

--
Stéphane

[Stéphane Graber]

I did look into this a little while back, from what I remember the
setup they have for lore is:

- majordomo as the mailing list backend (alternative to mailman)
- public-inbox as a subscriber to the lists to give you the git layer
and mbox files

So it's actually more complex than what we currently run. Though if
there's interest (someone willing to test and document the setup), we
should be able to setup the public-inbox part still while using Google
Groups as the mailing list handler.

[Serge E. Hallyn]

Yeah thanks - lemme see how the current setup treats me, and I may look
into the public-inbox support if needed.

[Narcis Garcia]

I want to encourage you to use only FOSS solutions, including
LinuXContainers when applicable. Promote by using them too.
Mentioning GDPR: FOSS have been the most ever respectful technologies
about personal data protection and privacy.

I don't trust GAFAM services (and both explicit and implicit TOS)
because of lack of transparency about their services softwares, and the
very reproachable sources of money.

How will you migrate personal data (subscribers) to a third company with
respecting GDPR?

I suggest you another solution: Move to Discourse (or similar FOSS
solution) (discuss.linuxcontainers.org) but not without making it more
polite in GDPR terms and strict CSP & SOP.

Regards.

Narcis Garcia

El 8/4/21 a les 15:47, Stéphane Graber ha escrit: