Hi Developers / Committers, As of yet, I've heard little feedback on the proposed mailing list migration. So, I'm assuming no one else has major objections to any of these options.
Currently, I'm leaning towards just migrating all mailing lists + archives into Google Groups, even though the dates of archived messages will appear incorrectly (this is option #1 described below). We can then add a note to the Google Group description letting everyone know that earlier messages all appear under the same date. I have not yet scheduled a start date for this process, but I'd hope to have it completed by the end of August. I plan to migrate less active lists first, and save our most active lists (dspace-tech especially) for last. Obviously though, I'll let each list know prior to migrating that list. Please do let me know though, if you have any thoughts (or prior Google Groups migration experience to share). Thanks, Tim On 7/29/2015 2:27 PM, Tim Donohue wrote: > Hi Developers, > > In case you haven't seen recent Developer Meeting notes, I wanted to > update everyone here on recent working investing the migration of our > DSpace mailing lists off of SourceForge (lists.sourceforge.net). As > you may have heard, SourceForge had some major stability issues > recently [1], plus there's been controversy around its practices [2], > not to mention the fact that all our mailing lists have crashed twice > this year already (Feb then last week). > > So, in some discussions on IRC, several of us feel it's about time to > move entirely off SourceForge. This includes finding a new home for > our mailing lists (including this one). > > Thus far, my concentration has been in looking to migrate us to Google > Groups. While everyone has their favorites, I've personally found > Google Groups easier to manage, and much easier to browse and search > (than Mailman which SourceForge uses). Plus, many other open source > projects in our space have jumped to Google Groups, including Fedora, > Hydra, Islandora. DSpace also already uses Google Groups for the > DSpace Community Advisory Team (DCAT) mailing list (and it's become > the "de facto" standard within DuraSpace for new mailing lists, > honestly). So, in a sense we'd be consolidating on GG. > > But, there is a big "gotcha" (hence this email discussion). > > In my testing, while I can migrate our SF mailing list archives to GG, > Google Groups ignores the *original* message's "Date" header. This > means that if we were to move our mailing list archives to Google > Groups, all the old messages will "appear" as if they were posted on > the migration date (i.e. while the message's date header may say 2004, > Google Groups will show it as 2015). Only the *date* seems affected. > From my testing, the archived messages, the authors, subjects and > their discussion threads all migrate well (and in the proper order). > But, the visible date ends up wrong. > > (If anyone else has experience with this, please do get in touch. At > this point, I suspect it's just Google Groups ignores these old "Date" > email headers in favor of the latest "Received" email header. But I > honestly cannot find proof of others seeing the same behavior. > Strangely, Fedora didn't see this behavior when they migrated back in > 2013 from SF to GG. But, since I'm using the exact same process they > used, I suspect this may be a recent change in GG behavior.) > > Because of this odd date issue, we are left with a bit of a conundrum. > Do we... > > 1) Migrate to Google Groups, and just let the older messages all > appear under Aug 2015 (or whatever the migration date ends up being). > This makes the old archives browsable/searchable via GG, but the dates > are not at all trustworthy / may cause confusion. > > 2) Migrate to Google Groups, but leave our archives behind / saved > elsewhere. This would mean we'd be starting "fresh". The old SF > archives could be saved as static files off dspace.org (so they would > be searchable in Google). Plus, they'd still be searchable via > archival sites like Nabble, GMane, The Mail Archive, etc. (and we tend > to point users to those services to search our archives anyways, since > SF archives are hard to search/browse). > > 3) Look into migrating our list elsewhere (not Google Groups). (Though > as mentioned, GG seems to be the new "de facto" standard these days > both within DuraSpace and with other open source repository platforms. > I don't see that changing anytime soon, as they all seem happy with GG.) > > 4) Stay on SourceForge a bit longer for mailing lists ONLY. (Though as > mentioned, our lists have crashed twice in the last 6 months. Not very > confidence building.) > > Thoughts? Or anyone else have experience with migrating list archives > into Google Groups with tips to share? > > - Tim > > > [1] https://twitter.com/sfnet_ops (see posts from July 17 until today. > As of today, all SF services are still not fully restored) > [2] > http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/sourceforge-addresses-the-controversy-surrounding-ad-bundling/ > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Dspace-devel mailing list Dspace-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dspace-devel
