mailman is included and built in the Launchpad source tree

[Gary Poster]

Mailman currently is included and built in the Launchpad source tree in a very custom way. This makes the build and integration hard to understand and hard to change.

One way to improve this would be to switch to mailman three which has a distutils build system.

Another, better, way is to treat mailman as a microservice and remove it from the tree: work to the interface instead. As mailman does all its work by polling LP, LP merely needs tests that assert the XMLRPC interfaces needed by mailman actually exist and work; LP can then provide a network test fake to let the mailman side of things be tested from the mailman side.

This would remove the monkey patching, make our test suite leaner and faster, and make when-to-deploy mailman easier to reason about and understand.

[Barry Warsaw (barry)]

An interim solution would be to fork upstream Mailman 2.1, apply our patches to the branch and make it available via PPA. We can then include a mmi recipe to build it within our tree, which is what I think Gary is doing in his buildout branch.

[Robert Collins (lifeless)]

I have a better suggestion - treat mailman as a microservice and remove it from the tree: work to the interface instead: mailman does all its work by polling LP, so LP merely needs tests that assert the XMLRPC interfaces needed by mailman actually exist and work; LP can then provide a network test fake to let the mailman side of things be tested from that side.

I'm going to repurpose this bug, because the spirit of it - that the integration is awkward and confusing - will be resolved by the microservice approach.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

Mailman is now built from the much smaller lp-mailman tree instead, and is no longer built as part of Launchpad (https://code.launchpad.net/~cjwatson/launchpad/+git/launchpad/+merge/379464).