XSF Discussion - 2019-08-28

linkmauve, xmpp:berlin-meetup@conference.conversations.im?join

perhaps a dinner with one of the berlin xmpp guys? ;)

eevvoor, sure!

PEP defines that a service must support the 'owner' and 'subscriber' affiliations. 0060 doesn't define an affiliation named 'subscriber'. How should I read that?

I quietly ignored that

Well, not too quietly actually

https://mail.jabber.org/pipermail/standards/2018-August/035319.html

Was it removed?

If you read it in a certain way, I said I'd submit a PR

Did you?

it wasn't removed, because I just found the same thing 🙂

I don't recall submitting a PR

But the rules clearly state that now Guus has found it, it's his responsibility

ah, yes.

the infamous 'touched it last' rule

there's something to be said for requiring a affiliation that grants the subscribe privilege though

gotta feed the offsping - ttyl

Guus, yes, maybe, perhaps - but it's controlled by the access_model

So as far as design goes, there would be the choice between modelling "entity may subscribe" as either a new affiliation, or as a property of the node

It really would be nice if we had an tracker for such issues (and ideally not github)

I'm fairly sure there never was a subscriber affiliation.

flow: agreed. Maybe we should look into hosting a Gitlab instance, but first things first. MattJ is still making an inventory for iteam, and then they can define what to do next, and ask for help if needed.

what would be the principal difference between github and gitlab?

one is self hosted

gitlab requires some serious amount of resources though

Write them down in the wiki?

Yeah, I'd be a -1 to self-hosting anything, for now at least

We *had* a self-hosted tracker in the past, fwiw

jonas’: besides of the obvious hosting question, what's the _principal_ difference?

Both provide an issue tracker, so if we need an issue tracker, why not make use of our XSF github?

If we need something different from an issue tracker, why use gitlab?

Ge0rG: free software/not. The feature set is more or less similar tbh. Gitlab seems to be a lot more open to big projects out there though

pep., gitlab isn’t free software once you have an edition which doesn’t suck ;)

Gitlab's email handling is pretty cool nowadays, (I rarely need to open the browser), bit that's not something github is incapable of doing.

What were the requirements again?

jonas’: what features do you require for it not to suck?

What problem are we solving?

properly cross-referencing issues

you can link issues, but they don’t show up as related. you need something beyond CE for that

Zash: no idea. Somebody asked questions about github and gitlab

(don’t confuse this with the feature of related merge requests, which *is* in CE)

I don't understand how "it's not github" is a relevant feature request, considering the state of our infra.

jonas’: yeah I get it

jonas’: it's not impossible that if a big project whines a bit to gitlab they backport it to CE :p

flow: what did you have in mind?

I don't want "not github", I want "not requiring an account with a single vendor"

Zash: you can login to github with your gmail! 😁

Memberbot is still online until our member meeting tomorrow. In case you have not voted yet ;-)

Alex: 👍

!

And Link Mauve has reapplied!

But he hasn't voted yet and his server is down. And mom-support doesn't know how to bring it back up :p

I accept votes also be Email

His email server is at the same place :p

Anyway, that's his issue to solve. He can contact you if he needs to

He's got jabberfr temporarily

pep.: but how do we know it's actually him?

I was with him until yesterday

Or the day before

How do you know, I don't know

I was actually going to ask if that was something board and council made sure of at every session :p

On some days I don't know whether it's me or not

If council members can see jids in the room for example

pep.: there are questions that must not be asked

He he he

Prosody supports nickname reservations, so that could be used

I suppose our voting shots are long enough to cover issues like this. One should vote as early as one can. And missing one vote is not a disaster.

Slots

ralphm: agreed

But, people.

pep., gitlab and discourse

Discourse is no issue tracker though. It's a forum? A place you can have discussions that are stored and that you can search through. We have the mailing lists for that

Well, it is up to Alex to make a determination. And some things don't have to be solved by technology.

pep., right, it's a forum and, depending on how you look at it, a mailing list

On GitHub, we choose that for convenience and you don't have to use it if you don't want to.

Primarily discussions are on our mailinglists, some here. If you want to provide new stuff or patch existing stuff you can git send-mail it, or something.

If we indeed want to move to an issue tracker, which was decided against last time around, we can still use Github (for setup convenience) or self hosted Gitlab or something, but that will require ongoing maintenance, and people to (want to) do that.

flow: when you say gitlab is it specifically the self-hosted version, or gitlab.com would do?

pep., I am pro-self hosting

I don't see a point in moving from one hosted thing to another.

err "pro self-hosting"

flow: me too generally.

I like pro-self hosting, too. I call that my website.

ralphm: it depends. It's pretty subjective but I trust gitlab folks more than github. For one they're not entirely being hypocrites promoting free software and not using it themselves

I think we miss a big opportunity by not providing source.xmpp.org and discuss.xmpp.org

pep.: Yet?

What does that mean?

Ah, you mean they'll inevitably turn into github?

Maybe

Sure. It's a for profit model after all.

I don't know either of them personally and companies change

I wouldn't mind pairing with another foundation if that's a thing, tbh

you might want to look at https://gitea.io/ before gitlab

For the infra

moparisthebest: yeah I had that in mind

for self hosting anyway

Gitlab is a beast

yea... it really is

I had to maintain one until not so long ago

not saying that we could not look into alternatives, but gitlab has the most traction,

and that is usually the crucial point if you are going long term

This

I don't think gitlab is a key element tbh. I also do prefer self-host, but gitlab really is a monster.

on the other hand, I think gitlab has a trello clone thing built in, so you could ditch trello too

Aaaannd we need people to support it anyway, so I suggest we leave the discussion here :p

pep.: if you mean in that has many moving parts, sure. But it is relatively straight-forward to setup and manage, as they have this omnipackage.

but as far as "how easy it is to host/maintain" and "how many resources it requires" gitea wins easily over gitlab, if those aren't your concerns, then choose based on something else

pep.: exactly

ralphm: the omni thing is going away aiui

issue-tracker! hgweb! ... clone the prosody.im setup!! 😀

moparisthebest: I'm not familiar with gitea (at all)

pep.: hm, well, if they then switch to proper .debs, that works, too

Gitea seems fine. Annoys me less than Gitlab. But what was the problem being solved again?

ralphm: You mean the usual outdated .deb? With runners that are also a few years old? :)

Zash: someone suggested wanting tickets

gitea is a single static go binary, you run it, you *can* point it at a database or just use sqlite, that's it

pep.: I don't know, many teams seem capable of having PPAs

Debian runs their infra on gitlab, but when I was maintaining it, they weren't updating the package, they were using upstream directly from what I understand

The issue was with ml threads like "should we change x?" - "yes" ... (nothing happens)

I think?

Zash: yes, episode n+1

Also, last time we actually said no, I believe

One thing I'd like to have is a proper search feature for our MLs, then probably the discourse song would fade a bit

pep., searching is not a problem. But I really want to tag threads

pep.: I agree that would be nice. I just seem to not delete any mail from my XMPP related mailing list folders.

I don't know what 'tagging threads' means.

ralphm: sure, and that requires you to be on-list when the email is sent

imagine tags like 'stream-management' which would show you all threads about xep198

People joining in later can't do that

pep.: or download the mbox file

Haha

Nice ux

That would be nice

IIRC there's somewhere you can connect via IMAP and get read-only access to all IETF mailing list archives

Nice

The MUA I tried it with did not handle it well

This should work: https://mail.jabber.org/mailman/private/summit.mbox/summit.mbox

flow: I agree that would be nice. Though generally it's already been done, people out a xep number in the subject and it works fine

(Or whatever other keywords)

"…works fine" ← how do you know that?

Because I also search in there fairly often

but how you do know that you get all threads?

council vote emails don't have XEP numbers in subjects, just as one example

flow: who knows.. How do you know it works anyway..

moparisthebest: I can search through that as well. Xep/features are generally mentioned in the body at least

Anyway.. It's far from perfect, but it works

for some definition of works

what do we need XMPP for? we can just send text to each other over telnet, it works

Heh, standards.mbox is only 36377 messages, 192MB

Going back all the way to July 2001.

moparisthebest: heh, you're also in the discourse camp?

not necesarily, more like "downloading giant .mbox and figuring out how to use it seems like a poor way" camp haha, discourse is nice though

https://ponymail.incubator.apache.org/ could be an option, I've used it here before https://lists.apache.org/list.html?dev@poi.apache.org

moparisthebest: disappointing :/

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=xep198+xep-198+site%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fmail.jabber.org%2Fpipermail%2Fstandards%2F that doesn't work very well

I've briefly considered migrating to Mailman 3, but it will break the archives, or you have to keep the old archive around or somesuch. http://docs.mailman3.org/en/latest/migration.html

and https://www.google.com/search?q=xep198%20xep-198%20site%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fmail.jabber.org%2Fpipermail%2Fstandards%2F only has 3 results

ralphm: that would be nice. We can certainly keep static archives alongside

The are a bunch of other caveats listed there. I'm scared a bit.

What about having a mirror of the archive with some other, more modern web frontend? Or nicely ask the gmane folks

Ge0rG: oh, you mean Mailman 3?

ralphm: whatever can be installed alongside the current mailman

I'm not there's a lot of that. The problem is that Mailman 2, which we are currently running, just like probably 99% of all mailing lists, has been in maintenance mode for years, and nobody actually seems to be focussed on it anymore. Somebody would have to do the research on this, but it doesn't sound trivial. Additionally, Mailman 2 is written in Python 2, which is EOL at the end of the year.

In years, or in decades?

Where are Mailman 3 sources hosted?

https://code.launchpad.net/mailman seems to suggest that Mailman 2 had commits a few weeks ago and Mailman 3 hasn't been touched in years.

Reminds me of the xmpp client list activity.

Zash: https://gitlab.com/mailman/mailman

Oh of course

I wasn't aware somebody's actually still doing stuff on 2.1, but I don't think those are big things

https://bazaar.launchpad.net/~mailman-coders/mailman/2.1/changes/1819?start_revid=1819

Ah, the mailman 3 link in the menu does link to gitlab

Basically https://wiki.list.org/msapiro has been doing this on his own since 2008.

https://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-users/2019-April/084332.html

(also note that that particular list is still on 2.1 :-) )

> There are already 73 Mailman 3 lists @python.org (there are still 313 MM 2.1 lists).

Woah

I am running Mailman myself for a couple of lists, and may attempt to migrate some.

I was surprised how small the standards@ mbox file is.

First snag: apparently Ubuntu packages only became available starting with 18.04, so I have to do quite some yak shaving.

Get away from my yak!

Training for the 2020 Yak shaving world cup starts now!

The mailman always rings twice!

So I've been looking at yaxim every three minutes like a lab rat pushing the reward button, and then I realized that sending CSI is a GDPR issue

Don't you just spin up another docker container in 2019

Hush now