Subject: Alioth: the future of mailing lists

Dear users of alioth,

As the Alioth system is not something that we as a project have the will
and manpower to maintain in its current form, we held a sprint [sprint]
last month in Hamburg, Germany,  and discussed options and the future of
the several services currently provided by Alioth.

One of those dicussions centered around the mailinglists currently
provided by Alioth on lists.alioth.debian.org [minutes].

So far, nobody is planning on providing a new, general purpose mailinglist
infrastructure that will just take over all Alioth mailinglists.

During the sprint, we looked at the set of lists and identified several
main categories.
  - Commit mailinglists.  We think these can be retired and replaced by
    notification features of modern SCV hosting platforms such as the
    upcoming salsa.debian.org git hosting infrastructure.
  - Discussion and support mailinglists.  These might find a new home
    on lists.debian.org; see below.
  - Distribution lists for use in the Maintainer: field.  We suggest
    that, with maybe some extra code, this use-case could be well served
    by the tracker.debian.org service for almost all purposes.  For
    larger teams, such as the Debian Perl Group, a list on lists.debian.org
    might be another option.


If you currently manage a user-support or discussion list, or run one
of the big teams that would benefit from a lists.debian.org mailinglist,
please check out the migration/import hints that the listmasters provide.
A summary can be found at [lists].  The listmasters emphasize that only a
fraction of the mailing lists from Alioth are suitable for being moved to
lists.debian.org.


Proposed Timeline:
 * 2018-02-01: mailing lists on Alioth are disabled; incoming mail is
   no longer accepted.
 * May 2018 (with the wheezy EOL): alioth is shut down; mailing list
   archives are unavailable.  (A static export/dump will be provided
   in some convenient location.)

Cheers,
the people from Alioth Sprint 2017

[sprint]  https://wiki.debian.org/Sprints/2017/Alioth
[minutes] https://wiki.debian.org/Sprints/2017/Alioth/MeetingMinutes/Mailinglist
[lists]   https://wiki.debian.org/Alioth#Mailinglists