Developers of Sympa

[IKEDA Soji <address@concealed>]

FYI.

Before JRES 2017, I interviewed as current "release manager" of Sympa
project by Marc and David.  As my answer contained some topics not adopted in
the report by them, I'll forward it to sympa-developpers.

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From: IKEDA Soji
To: Marc Chantreux
Cc: david
Subject: Re: dear sympa release manager, can you share with us ?
Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2017 09:49:11 +0900

Hi Marc and David,

On Tue, 26 Sep 2017 16:36:03 +0200
Marc Chantreux <address@concealed> wrote:

> hello Soji,
> 
> David and I have will give a talk at JRES 2017 in which we would like to
> spot and explain the strengths and relevance of the open source for the
> public research network using the sympa history as story telling.
> 
> so we would like you to be mentionned on the article: you are the release
> manager of 6.2 and a long time contributor.
> 
> Can you share with us your experience of sympa ?

Okey, I'll try answering.  Begin with the first question:


> * when, how and why did you start to use sympa and contribute ?

Messaging by e-mail is one of main fields through my carrer.
On mailing list manager (MLM), my first installation was Majordomo
in mid-1990's for communication in my workplace.

Even in these years, mail user interface (command lines sent as
e-mail messages) provided by Majordomo appeared slightly outdated:
In Japan, Internet had boomed in late 1980's, and users had became
familiar with GUI using web browser[1].

GNU Mailman was my next major experience.  It provided web
interface for administrators and subscribers, along with mail user
interface.  I worked for Mailman in mainly translation, together
with japanese committer Tokio Kikuchi (gone).

It had many other useful features including delivery modes (reception
modes) also adopted by Sympa.  However, I came to feel that it has
difficulties.  Primary of them was on inter-lingual operability: A
list sticks to its main language setting, especially character set
setting, thus templates and archived messages are forced particular
character set[2].  It looked difficult for me to change this
behavior.

Sympa (5.x at that time) was already multilingual, and I felt it is
easier to solve problems described above on Sympa.  It was the
beginning of why I involved in mid-2000's.


[1] On web UI, attempts by several free software seemed premature,
  e.g. MajorCool, FML.  Because, in my opinion, they did not have
  distinct concept of user roles.

[2] This restriction applys to GNU Mailman 2.x.  Current 3.x,
  entirely rewritten release, may not be the case more or less.

----

I'll answer the rest of questions later.

Regards,

-- Soji

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From: IKEDA Soji <address@concealed>
To: Marc Chantreux
Cc: david
Subject: Re: dear sympa release manager, can you share with us ?
Date: Tue, 10 Oct 2017 13:03:57 +0900

On Tue, 26 Sep 2017 16:36:03 +0200
Marc Chantreux <address@concealed> wrote:

> * what's your opinion about the community ? was it hard to get it ?
>   what was the good and bad part of it ?
>   do you think it's friendly enough ? do you have ideas to improve it ?
>   are you expecting something from it ?

Diversity is important property of the community, I think.
On this respect, current community is favorable for me:
Though English is lingua franca, lingual background of members
are various; they are a collection of various social sectors ---
academia, non-profit or enterprise; they have various experiences on
programming.

I feel transition to GitHub was good decision for the community.
Because the community came back to life by finding new audiences and
coworkers.

I want to say about a few about (programming) language: TMTOWTDI is
the motto because of which I am prefer to Perl, but it is slightly
elderly.  The future of Sympa can be a chimera of multiple paradigms,
and role of Perl may be reduced.


----
Hmm, desultory answer. 
I'll answer the last question, if the time permits.

Regards,

-- Soji

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