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My Role in the Development of Mailman_, the GNU Mailing List Manager
====================================================================

`Mailman`_ (and `described on wikipedia`_) is a prevalent open-source mailing list management system that's
turning out to be useful and popular, and i had a substantial role in
getting it there.  Barry (mailman's current lead developer) lists me as
"mailman's savior" in the `acknowledgements`_, and here's the story.

While managing mailing lists on python.org, i got frustrated working
with Majordomo, a perl package that was the prevalent choice at the time.
With Python zeal i unearthed a languishing prototype of a python-based
mailing list manager, Mailman.  The inventor, John Viega, had lost some
substantial work on it in a disk crash, and had been too busy with grad
school to resume development, so i picked it up.  (He posted_ about this
early on when i releasing my preliminary work.)

I did a lot of refinement and development - pretty much all of the
unattributed entries in the mailman NEWS_ file from the earliest (0.91) to
1.0b4 are my work.  I continued to lead development until i left my job
at the time (CNRI), in Jan. 1999, to dive into Zope development
at Digital Creations (eventually known as Zope Corporation).

Possibly the most valuable choice i made in working on that system (except
maybe giving early priority to cleaning up unnecessarily unqualified python
"except" statements:-) was using the system for collaboration while i was
developing it, once it was sufficiently far along.  As it progressed i ran
mailing lists on python.org for two very different user constituencies:

- mailman-developers and mailman-users - initially for those interested in
  following what i was doing, and after not too long, in contributing to
  development

- dc-ci - a private mailing list for local `Contact Improvisation`_
  practitioners

The diversity of these constituencies was especially valuable in driving
the range, utility, and usability of the features on which i concentrated.

As things progressed i eventually migrated all the python.org mailling
lists to mailman.  As things continued to progress, and particularly through
barry's attention, Mailman become the official GNU mailing list management
software, and many of the world's open source projects - and commercial
projects, for that matter - now use it, as well.

I was involved in writing the two original papers about Mailman:
`Mailman \- An Extensible Mailing List Manager Using Python`_ (*pdf*; i
presented this paper at the seventh international python conference) and
`Mailman: The GNU Mailing List Manager`_.

.. figure:: turmoil_compact.jpg
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  :width: 500
  :align: center

.. _Mailman: http://www.gnu.org/software/mailman/
.. _`described on wikipedia`: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Mailman
.. _`acknowledgements`: 
   http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/mailman/mailman/ACKNOWLEDGMENTS?rev=HEAD&content-type=text/vnd.viewcvs-markup
.. _NEWS: http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/mailman/mailman/NEWS?view=markup
.. _`Mailman \- An Extensible Mailing List Manager Using Python`:
   mailman_ip7.pdf
.. _`Mailman: The GNU Mailing List Manager`: http://barry.warsaw.us/papers/published.pdf
.. _`posted`: http://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-developers/1998-February/004579.html
.. _`Contact Improvisation`: http://www.contactimprov.net/