Saturday, May 19, 2018

Reactivating the lino-developers mailing list

Yesterday Abdelkader asked me two questions via Hangouts. My problem with giving 1:1 support on HO is that nobody else can see it. And that’s a pity because Abdelkader’s questions are as such already a valuable contribution to the Lino project.

The lino-developers mailing list created in 2015 was meant to fix that problem. I think it is time to activate it. I remind what I wrote on this list in December 2015:

I suggest that you all try to use this list when talking with me about Lino so that the others have a chance to participate. This list is not meant as a newsletter but as a discussion forum, so please don’t fear to ask stupid questions. This list is not meant for non-technical stakeholders, so don’t hesitate to speak openly about problems and criticize things you dislike.

This list had a little problem: the public archives (http://lino-framework.org/pipermail/lino-developers/) were not visible. When you went there, Apache told you:

Forbidden

You don’t have permission to access /pipermail/lino-developers/ on this server.

The problem was a missing x permission for others on the archives directory as explained here, and here is how I fixed it:

$ sudo ls -ld /var/lib/mailman/archives/private/
drwxrws--- 48 list list 4096 Apr 26  2016 /var/lib/mailman/archives/private/
$ sudo chmod o+x /var/lib/mailman/archives/private/
$ sudo ls -ld /var/lib/mailman/archives/private/
drwxrws--x 48 list list 4096 Apr 26  2016 /var/lib/mailman/archives/private/

Yes the Mailman layout is not very modern. But it works and is mature technology…