Subject: Announcements of new sympa release
List archive
- From: David Verdin <>
- To:
- Subject: [sympa-announce] Sympa 6 beta released!
- Date: Wed, 17 Jun 2009 11:40:12 +0200
Title: Here comes Sympa V6 beta [Comité Réseau des Universités]
Here comes Sympa V6 beta
The CRU team is pleased to deliver Sympa V6 to the open source community. Sympa V6 is the result of more than one year of project activity and is a great improvement to Sympa earlier versions.
People who want to beta test Sympa 6 will register and give informations so that we know in which environment Sympa was tested . In return, they will get a dedicated help from the Sympa development team during the full beta test. Answering to help request for a beta tester will be our first priority during these seven weeks. This will probably be at the expense of classical support lists, such as sympa-users, so feel free to involve in collaborative support to fill this lack.
If you want to get involved, subscribe to the Sympa beta test mailing list. The subscriber review of this list is closed, safe to the list owners (the Sympa authors). This list is the official registration tool for beta testing. It can be a medium for general questions about the beta but, if you prefer, you can also send assistance requests directly to the sympa authors: .
What's new in Sympa V6 Beta ?
Message bulk mailer
Sympa comes with a new daemon that copes with low-level message distribution.The new bulk.pl daemon allows to parallelize mail sending across different processes and even on multiple servers. This is a major step towards Sympa clustering. Here are the nice features provided by the new bulk architecture already:
- message distribution recovery : distribution can now be stopped and restarted later without message duplication for subscribers.
- priorities : message for a list with a high priority are delivered with a very low latency even is a long distribution is started for a hugue list
- scheduled message processing : message distribution can be distributed at a specified hour (using a list parameter)
Related changes :
- you need to start a new bulk.pl process;
- once sympa.pl has processed a message, it is not delivered, but stored in the bulk spool;
- the bulk spool is stored in the database (shareable among different servers). You may need to tune the database in order to support large message.
sympa.pl --test_database_message_buffer
allow you to test the maximum size of messages that can be stored in your database.
New pretty style
The web interface has been renewed, thanks to Olivier Lumineau (CRU) work. Apart from the new look and feel, the main changes are the new navigation menus for both list administrators and listmasters features.
Sending HTML
You can send HTML pages as messages to your list. this is simply done through the web interface. Just fill in the URL of the page you want to send and a message subject and bam! The page is sent. Please note that this message will be read by mail clients which are quite limited regarding web languages interpretation. So don't try sending pages in which scripts are essential for a good rendering.
Security
Now password are stored as a fingerprint (by the past reversible encryption was used to be able to remind password). Reminding passwords is replaced by an identity token sent by email (thoses tokens can be used only one time and there validity it limited).
sympa.pl --md5_encode_password
Please note that this change in password storage is not reversible. Once you did it, there is no way back, despite regenerating all the passwords, so proceed only if you're sure you want to keep using Sympa 6.
Installation process
Guillaume Rousse (IRISA) brought a lot of modifications were brought to the autotools usage in Sympa. This is still a work in progress, but should make the life of Sympa packagers quite easier once it is finished. This work has greatly simplified all Makefiles, turned into Makefile.am. Substitutions in perl modules are now performed at the “make” time, no more during “make install”
Here is the list of significant changes regarding the installation process:
- Default sympa configuration files, previously stored in
PREFIX/bin/etc/are now stored inPREFIX/share/default/directory
- Most --with-xxdir configure options are now obsolete, replaced by equivalent standard --xxdir options.
- Most default installation directories have been change to adopt standard FHS-compliant locations. However, the distributed tar.gz still uses most of the previous locations to make upgrade process less awkward. If you run ”./configure ; make ; make install” with the tar.gz things will install as usually. If you run autoconf, it will define the set of target directories either the old way or the FHS way, depending on whether it finds an existing /etc/sympa.conf file.
- Removed obsolete sudo wrappers ; Sympa now includes C wrappers for both wwsympa.fcgi and sympa_soap_server.fcgi. Check the manual for more informations on that topic
- A new library is required to build Sympa : gettext-devel. This is necessary to compile the internationalization catalogues.
administration
Cloning
You can now create a list just by copying an existing list. The newly created list has the same configuration options and customization (message headers and footer for example). It has empty subscribers list, archives and shared directory.
New scenario condition
less_than. (Submitted by S. Amrani, gendarmerie nationale). It Allows to compare two values. Is true if the first one is less than the second one. Works with strings, too, if you like.verify_netmask. Exemple : verify_netmask('1.12.123.00/24') (changes in intranet scenarii are just commented because we don't have access to the local netmask of installation).
moderation
Moderators can compose rejection notification messages templates for automatic later use, on the web interface.
Spams
Sympa can recognize headers added by incoming spam message filters. Sympa does not answer automatically to those messages, they are submitted in special way to moderators both by mail or in the web interface for moderation. By default rejection is done quietly.
External datasources
Now you may configure a list in order to send notification for new subscribers that are collected from an external datasource.
Web administration
Setting some Sympa parameters is now possible using the web interface. Those parameters are stored in Sympa database. In version 6.0 only colors parameters can be changed using this method, but it settles the core functionalities used to fully transfer the Sympa configuration into its database, and its subsequent edition through the web interface.
Internationalization
Four new languages were recently added to the standard Sympa distribution. Many thanks to the translators:
- Bokmål (B.C. Aasgaard)
- Polish (L. Zygmanski)
- Finn (J.P. Paloposki)
- Vietnamese (C. Siddall)
In addition, Soji ikeda reactivated the legacy character support, as discussed in https://listes.cru.fr/sympa/arc/sympa-dev/2006-09/msg00029.html and its follow-ups. if the (new) sympa.conf parameter 'legacy_character_support_feature' value is set to 'on', the legacy character support is enabled.
Bug fixes
Lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of bug fixes.
Just have a look at the NEWS file in the distribution to be convinced.
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- [sympa-announce] Sympa 6 beta released!, David Verdin, 06/17/2009
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