Developers of Sympa

[David Verdin <address@concealed>]

We are pleased to announce that we are currently working on the latest features to be included in the next major version of Sympa: the 6.0.

Sympa 6 is an evolution of the software towards scalability and high availability. It will also offer a better ease of use and improved possibilities to adapt it to your particular needs and information system.

Shortly, the Sympa 6.0 will offer the following major features:

•       Mail sending improvements: checkpoint recovery, scheduled sending, better priority handling...
•       Making users life easier: personalized welcome page, good looking web interface, contextual help...
•       For owners and moderator: reject message customization, list cloning...
•       Easier packaging. The full autotools usage in Sympa was rewritten by Guillaume Rousse (INRIA) (thanks again Guillaume! :-)). This should greatly improve the life of Sympa packagers around here.
•       As always: improved internationalization, thanks to the efforts all the fine people involved in Sympa translation.

Here is the scheduled timeline to this new Sympa version:

•       Tuesday 21st April: release of Sympa 6.0 beta
•       Tuesday 16th June: release of the stable version of Sympa 6.0

What's next in this message is what we really want you to read!



The most attentive readers will note that, for once, we spared a 7 weeks beta test period. That's because we felt a cruel lack of beta testing in the most recent releases of Sympa. This notably led to awkward bug reports a few days after the release. These were bugs on functionalities that were tested during several months on our own production system. Problem is: due to the high diversity of systems (OS, RDBMS, MTA, web servers...) likely to be used with Sympa, there are a lot of combinations we can't test. Early bug reports are the consequences of such combinations.

That's why we want to encourage people beta testing Sympa. We want you to install the beta version on production servers.

So this is our proposal: 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: address@concealed.

Looking forward to see you in the beta!

Cheers,

The Sympa development team.

-- 
David Verdin
Comité réseau des universités

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