Archive mailing lists automatically on Gmane

[Barry Warsaw]

A lot of people (myself included!) like to read mailing lists via NNTP. It might be a good idea to automatically create Gmane newsgroups for all publicly available Launchpad mailing lists, similar to the way we automatically archive to www.mail-archive.com

[André Klitzing (misery)]

Well, I don't think that the people of gmane.org will agree with AUTOMATICALLY creation of ALL public mailing lists.
Launchpad.net could set up his how NNTP-Server for all lists and provide a button like "subscribe to gmane.org, too".

[Barry Warsaw (barry)]

This should be a post-2.0 feature.

[Sebastian Żurek (sebzur)]

I would also LOVE to read/post my Team mail list with e.g. KNode.

So waiting the 2.0.

[Torsten Bronger (bronger)]

I think the most realistic approach is to let Gmane to subscribe to Launchpad mailing lists by patching Launchpad's Mailman so that it accepts email subscription requests from <anything>@m.gmane.org.

This way, the Gmane infrastructure needn't be changed, and changes in Launchpad are minor, too. A list is converted to a newsgroup after an ordinary manual subscription request by some user on Gmane.

[Barry Warsaw (barry)]

I don't think we want to allow external subscriptions by email. To support this functionality (which I want too!) we'll either do something similar to what we did with mail-archive.com (auto-subscribe gmane), or we'll ask mail-archive.com to forward messages to gmane (which i believe is an option we decided not to do at first). Or we'll work on our own NNTP bridge to the archives. This latter is being worked on in upstream Mailman 3 (or perhaps as a separate Pipermail project).

[Torsten Bronger (bronger)]

I don't think that auto-subscribe or forwarding from mail-archive would be feasible. At least, I don't see how this is supposed to work. May I ask why Gmane (and only it) shouldn't be allowed to subscribe? Which attack vectors do you see? I'm a Gmane admin (albeit lazy recently) so I could answer a few questions.

On the other hand, a dedicated Launchpad NNTP service sounds great, too.

[Barry Warsaw (barry)]

Actually, we don't process email commands at all, so Gmane isn't special here, and we don't want to turn that on just for Gmane. I'm open to other suggestions though. My preference would be that if we enable Gmane integration for Launchpad, we do that automatically and for all public mailing lists, like we do now for mail-archive.com.

Suggestions are welcome!

[Torsten Bronger (bronger)]

Gmane has a huge internal text file for all groups. Groups are created manually by a human inserting a new dataset into this text file. One dataset looks like this:

gmane.comp.cms.launchpad.user launchpad-users (at) lists.launchpad.net
  Discussion relevant to users of Launchpad.
  mailman gcclu-launchpad-users
  password=******
  url=http://launchpad.net

gcclu-launchpad-users (at) m.gmane.org is the address with which Gmane is subscribed to the list.

The only solution involving Gmane I can think of now is that Launchpad sends a (welcome) email to Gmane for every new group. The Gmane address must follow some convention, e.g. launchpad-users-<hash> (at) m.gmane.org. The <hash> includes the list name and a salt that only Launchpad and Gmane know. The email contains the password. Then, Lars Ingebrigdsen must write a script that catches these emails and inserts the group dataset to the text file.

[Tobias C. Rittweiler (tcr)]

FWIW, I think a gmane gateway is the only thing that's missing for
Launchpad's bug tracker to become a superb product.

[Tobias C. Rittweiler (tcr)]

I was pointed out that I totally misread the request. I thought this is about
a gmane gateway for the bug tracker notification (new bugs, changes,
comments, etc.) -- but it's for Launchpad provided mailing lists.

So my previous overly-enthusiastic comment should be read in that
context:

What I direly miss is a gmane gateway to the bug tracker.

[Curtis Hovey (sinzui)]

I am not sure how a undeveloped feature in a web site affects code that is installed on user systems. Launchpad does not depend upon Desire, and I can use desire without Launchpad. I think this is a mistake to say that this bug is in the Desire code base.

[Dimitri John Ledkov (xnox)]

Maybe there can be a simple bot/account "Gmane" which can be added to relevant teams to become mailing list archiver?

[risto3 (risto3)]

Not fond of email pollution *at all*, it would be extremely useful to find and implement a solution to interoperate with gmane/gwene, alternatively launchpad could simply provide an NNTP server (like mailman and others).

Can this be opened back up?

[Lucy Llewellyn (lucyllewy)]

marking the bug as invalid against the "desire" project as that is actually something to do with lisp according to it's project page.