Adding mailman-users@mailman3.org. Technical suggestions should go to distro channels or to Mailman's issue tracker: https://gitlab.com/mailman/mailman/-/issues/1176. Further discussion of technical details is best done there.
Thomas Krichel writes:
Stephen J. Turnbull writes
Debian has traditionally been quite slow to update Mailman,
And now it has the addition issue that Debian testing python standard it 3.13, so the nntplib is no longer supported. Thus the current Mailman debian testing appears broken.
That's Debian's problem, as we currently don't support Python 3.13, although of course we intend to. This is the only issue that came up in a quick search of Mailman's issue tracker for Python 3.13 (but I did not check the other subprojects such as Postorius). I conclude that not a lot of work has been done on supporting Python 3.13 (rather than the optimistic "there's nothing to be done"). From Mailman's point of view, users have two excellent options for the forseeable future: (1) don't gateway list <-> newsgroups (2) install Mailman into a Python 3.9--3.12 virtual environment.
I'm sympathetic to the needs of the Debian developers, and at this point for 99% of software it's perfectly reasonable to aim to use 3.13 in the next Debian release. Unfortunately for Mailman users on Debian hosts that's not high on our list of priorities since we recommend a virtual environment installation in any case.
At present there seem to be three ways forward for Debian packaging:
- Remove NNTP support. (In honor of larsi, I'd rather not.)
- Add nntplib.py from the Python 3.12 nntplib, as a stopgap until option 3 can be implemented. I can't speak for other developers but we might be willing to add it as a contrib module, especially if that might make life easier for distro packagers. It's suboptimal though since that absolutely has to be considered techical debt that will need to be paid someday.
- Port Mailman to pynntp (that may need to be Debian packaged, too), which has seen a revival of activity and two feature releases since 2023.
My inclination as a Mailman core developer is not to participate actively in development of NNTP support in Mailman for Python 3.13+ unless we see an outpouring of support from site admins. However, I would be happy to answer questions and work on Mailman-side issues that are blocking or inconvenient for the NNTP work. Mark and Abhilash would undoubtedly contribute as well, on a time-available basis.
I certainly would love to build an alternative Mailman Debian package that would be more up-to-date, but I don't want to do it on my own.
Debian and Python are compatible free software; just take the existing package metadata, in a recent Mailman (presumably the most recent release) drop in the most recent nntplib, and change all the import statements. mailman/src/mailman/mta/nntplib.py seems like a plausible location. IWBNI you could keep all Mailmanisms out of nntplib (because of the GPL) so any bugfixes or improvements could be available to the Python community.
I think you could probably be up and running VERY quickly with that approach. Of course it wouldn't just slot into the next iteration of Debian because they have stringent QA (or maybe that could go into unstable?). I'm pretty sure it would be useful right away to a whole lot of people who are willing to use a PPA.
Regards, Steve