The mailing list for listmasters using Sympa

["Nicolas Brouard" <address@concealed>]

Maintaining the RPMs is as important as improving the software.
Internet is still growing and many people will use other products like the
gnu mailing list server which will be quicker improved if the product is
gaining clients.

More people will use a product, more volunteers you will find to improve it.

With old rpms, new people won't be interested to update manually the
software and won't be volunteers to use it, like it and imporve it.

I think that most people who have tried to improve sympa have had
difficulties. For example I have never been able to debug the wwwsympa.fcgi
because I don't know where the logs are output (not in the syslog!).  In my
view, some documentation are missing for new sympa hackers.

If the sympa team lacks of energy (as written in the preceding message) to
improve sympa, it should concentrate on rpms and on documentation: Internet
is full of volunteers. And Sympa is still one of the best mailing list
server in my opinion.


The future of mailing lists is not in lists with a huge number of subsribers
but in small, dedicated lists with efficient WEB access like sympa is on the
way to offer.

On many aspects things have change this the beginning of Internet's mails
and sympa must change too.

For example because of the growth of Internet the identity of a person has
changed within the last 10 years: it is not his/her name and occupation
which are very private but his/her email address.

So, for some sort of lists, it is very important to have access to the
identity of all the subscribers (we want to know whom we are talking to),
but it is not necessary to have access to their email address (neither to
their cellular phone). Email address is now a very private matter (and it
was not the case when Eric Thomas made the first listserver at IBM in late
80's).

We submitted our proposal on privacy and mailing lists to the French
Committee on Privacy (CNIL) and it has been approved (I can send it to
people who want it). But now the corresponding softwares are missing.

My hope is that sympa will evolve in that direction (roughly summarized
here):
 -A- two identity fields (1) Name-surname, (2) Institute-position and/or
what ever people want so that the identity of the person is unambiguous,
 -B- no access to the emails address of the subscribers (only  the owner has
access to the list of emails).
 -C- No access from the listmaster to list archives for privacy reasons.

These new rules won't apply to huge mailing lists (where you grab the
subsription address from an Internet surf).  In this latter case subsribers
don't know each other and have no reason to access the identity of other
subscriber (that was the only position of the CNIL). But for small mailing
lists (10 to 50) and for a group of people who know each other and meet at
other occasions than through mails exchange,  these new rules should be
important in the future.

My guess is that the distribution of the size of the mailing lists will
follow a Pareto law (like the rank-size law of cities or surnames). It means
that smaller the size of a mailing list, more numerous they will be.

We need softwares which will allow the creation and destruction of such
lists. I hope that sympa will move in that direction. And you?

Nicolas Brouard
address@concealed
Institut national d'études démographiques, Paris



-----Message d'origine-----
De : address@concealed [mailto:address@concealed]
Envoyé : mercredi 5 décembre 2001 13:48
À : Thomas Leavitt
Cc : Sympa-users
Objet : Re: [sympa-users] Installation issues with
sympa-3.3b.4-6.i386.rpm


Hi Thomas,

Thomas Leavitt wrote:
>
> Preface: I'm an experienced sysadmin (eight years and counting), so I know
> what I'm doing, generally. I don't ask for help lightly.

Fine

> O.K., I've spent several hours now dorking around trying to figure out the
> answer to this myself, and didn't see any information anywhere else about
> this so:
>
> I am trying to install Sympa onto a RedHat 7.0 machine, via the rpm
>
> The install complains that a whole bunch of packages are missing... o.k. I
> went to the RedHat site and found most of the packages.
>
> However, I cannot find:
>
> perl-CGI >= 2.52 is needed by sympa-3.3b.4-6
> *** no rpm by this name exists on RedHat, as far as I can tell
> perl-ldap >= 0.10 is needed by sympa-3.3b.4-6
> *** ditto
> perl-CipherSaber >= 0.50 is needed by sympa-3.3b.4-6
> *** so far as I can tell, no RPM of any sort is available on the 'net
>
> MHonArc >= 2.4.6 is needed by sympa-3.3b.4-6
> *** it also complains that the version of MHonArc is out of date... the
> latest I can get off RedHat.com is MHonArc-2.4.5-1.noarch.rpm

As far as we know, Sympa is not part of RedHat, therefore we can't
assume RedHat provides all required RPMs. That's why we recommend
searching on rpmfind.net
(see http://listes.cru.fr/sympa/distribution/binaries/).

Rpmfind provides
        o perl-CGI-2.78-1
        o perl-ldap-0.25-1
        o MHonArc-2.4.9-1.noarch

I could not find CipherSaber RPM ; it is optional for Sympa installation
though.

> a) it would be nice if the RPMs required by the sympa rpm package were
> available from the web site

We don't have energy to maintain these RPMs.
Providing the latest version for each package is also a big job...

> b) where do I find these... I really would like to maintain everything via
> RPM, it is so much cleaner... I guess I could just install it all from
> source, etc., but maintainability is a big priority for me.

I understand your constraint.

> [...]
> Wired since 1981. Internet enabled since 1990. Web enabled since 1993.

Sympa enabled soon....

--
Olivier Salaün
Comité Réseau des Universités