The mailing list for listmasters using Sympa

[Chris Hastie <address@concealed>]

On Fri, 23 Apr 2004, address@concealed wrote:

> Hi, I am currently running a mailing list on Ecartis but development seems 
> to
> be just about dead and I am thinking of jumping ship to Sympa. I spent some
> time reading the docs but I can't seem to find details on one important
> feature ...

Hi Jens

I recently made the same migration without too much trouble. Some of the 
things
I came up against in the process were:

No equivalent in Sympa of the Ecartis flag 'MODPOST'. This proved very easy to
sort with the addition of a database field and an appropriately modified
scenario.

Different meanings of various list aliases. This is the biggest problem I hit
from the point of view of making the transition as transparent as possible to
users. For example, <list>-request in Ecartis is a command address, whilst in
Sympa it is routed to the list owner. Unfortunately, which address is used in
many From: and Reply-to: headers in Sympa is hard coded so I never got around
this one. Users have just had to learn the new aliases.

Different digest formats. Ecartis uses plain-text (although IME it often 
didn't
make a good job of this if QP or Base64 were involved), Sympa uses
multipart/digest. Whilst generally multipart/digest is better, some MUAs,
particularly web mail system, don't deal well with this. I ended up creating a
patch to offer the choice, which you'll find in the bug tracking system
somewhere.

I did write a script to import users, which you're welcome to a copy of it you
contact me off list. It was really written to meet just my needs, so it's not
fit for general publication, but it's a basis to start from. Passwords can't 
be
imported because they are one-way encrypted in Ecartis, so the script creates
new passwords for all users.

--
Chris Hastie