Re: Migrating this list to a different platform (take 2)

[Konstantin Ryabitsev <konstantin@linuxfoundation.org>]

On Thu, Oct 19, 2023 at 03:57:35PM +0200, Jaroslav Kysela wrote:
> > I'm told that a while back there were some discussions to migrate this list to
> > vger, but the process never really got finalized.
> > 
> > I would like to restart this discussion again, because I am in the middle of
> > vger list migrations and it seems like an opportune moment to bring this up.
> > 
> > There are the following benefits to gain after migration:
> > 
> > - it becomes an open list that doesn't require much moderator involvement
> 
> I think that it may be the main reason to migrate it. How do you handle the
> inbound spam? It's the only reason, why our mailing list is moderated.

We do allow a small amount of spam through, unfortunately, but the combination
of aggressive blocklist checking, spam filtering, and strict content policies
allow us to keep that volume pretty low (1-2 messages a week for most lists).

> > - we can try to set up a forward from the old address, but previous attempts
> >    to do so with mailman had mixed results
> > - if the old address is set up to forward mail to the new address, then anyone
> >    sending to both addresses will get doubles of everything, which can be
> >    annoying
> > - setting up a hard bounce at the old address would probably be preferable,
> >    but it's a "ripping off the bandaid" kind of approach
> 
> Ideally, the e-mail address of the list should be preserved, but I guess
> that an option to redirect DNS MX records to LF servers is not possible,
> right?

Well, it's possible, but that would require us handling all of
alsa-project.org mail, and it's probably not what you want. We *can* set
things up so we treat alsa-project.org as an internal relay, and then you just
pass alsa-devel@alsa-project.org to our lists server, but this is somewhat
fragile as well.

There's a third option -- instead of migrating the alsa-devel list, we can
migrate all activity to linux-sound@vger.kernel.org. It's an existing list
that currently sees about 5 messages a year (and most of them are cc'd to
alsa-devel anyway).

The process would be:

1. Set up https://patchwork.kernel.org/project/alsa-devel/ to source from two
   lists instead of just alsa-devel (we do this already for netdev, which
   sources from both netdev and bpf lists)
2. Change all MAINTAINERS entries from alsa-devel to linux-sound
3. Eventually, this will result in almost no patches being sent to alsa-devel,
   at which point we can evaluate if the alsa-devel list sees little enough
   traffic that it can just be closed or redirected

I think this option is worth considering because it will achieve the desired
effect of removing moderation on submitted patches, keep existing maintainer
workflows, and not require actually migrating the alsa-devel list.

Thoughts?

-K