Is there a way we can buy you a cup of coffee or a beer for all you do?

Paul H. Tarver
Tarver Program Consultants, Inc.


-----Original Message-----
From: Ed Leafe [mailto:[email protected]] 
Sent: Friday, January 09, 2026 4:06 PM
To: ProFox Mailing List
Subject: Re: [ADMIN] New server

On Jan 9, 2026, at 15:35, Ed Leafe <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> Ok, this is a first test of the upgraded server and software. If it works,
I'll follow-up with more details.

Sorry for the delay, but it took a lot of work to upgraded everything.
Summary: I should have started with a fresh server and a fresh install of
the mail list software.

The server was running Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, which is nearly 6 years old. There
is a built-in process for upgrading it, first to the next LTS (22.04), and
finally to the current LTS (24.04). That took around a day, and only
involved going down a few dead-ends.

Next came the upgrade of the list software from GNU Mailman, which runs on
Python 2.x, to GNU Mailman3, which runs on Python 3.x. Importing the lists,
settings, and subscribers was easy enough, but it has a completely different
architecture under the hood, and some of the hacks I had added over the
years had to be re-written.

For example, I archive all messages to Elasticsearch, which makes searching
the archives very fast. But there was no clear way to do this in the new
software.

Enter Perplexity, Claude, and ChatGPT. I asked them all how to do this, and
they gave surprisingly different answers. Some were correct.

The problem seems to be that over the years, Mailman3 has evolved how it
works internally, and these LLMs had a mix of docs from all the versions,
and they had a hard time figuring out which doc was correct for my version.
I eventually got most things working, but it seems that the DB is not
getting updated yet. I'll tackle that next.

Another issue is the hack I wrote to forward selected messages to the
ProFoxTech list. Again, this required hacking around until I found the
correct place to do it. I think it's working, but I checked after I sent the
previous message, and I had a typo in a script, so the forwarding didn't
happen. I hope this one works better.

The subscription web interface has changed - it's now super-minimal. I'm not
in love with it, but there are things I can do to make it nicer. But for now
it's bare-bones.

There's still one thing I don't have working: the link in the footer to the
archive for the post. The problem is that Mailman3 doesn't expose the
Message-ID to the footer creation code, so I need to find a way to hack
that.


-- Ed Leafe


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