MACE-MList Conference Call June 22, 2005

*Action Items*
[AI] {Craig} will contact individuals responsible for maintaining Perl packages in Fedora core to see if there is any difficulty in including Sympa related Perl packages in FEDORA core ‘extras’.
[AI] {Craig} will send the list of supplemental Perl packages necessary for Sympa/FEDORA core to the group via the list.

Carry Over
[AI] {Paul, Serge and Olivier} will develop a list of generic topics addressing spam and mailing list management software.
[AI] {Jill} will develop VO survey distribution list, and will follow up with NSF and DOE for possible VO survey candidates.

*Attendees*
Jill Gemmill, University of Alabama at Birmingham (chair)
John-Paul Robinson, University of Alabama at Birmingham
Jim Phelps, University of Wisconsin - Madison
Olivier Salaün, Comité Réseau des Universités (FR)
Craig Hancock, Notre Dame
Paul Russell, Notre Dame
Terrie Clark, Internet2
Lisa Hogeboom, Internet2

*Discussion*

NMI-EDIT will hold an Advanced CAMP workshop discussing leveraging campus infrastructure to support virtual organizations from June 29 to July 1, 2005 at the Westin Tabor Center in Denver, Colorado. The activities of the MACE-MList WG pertaining to bundling open source system tools with federated administrative tools will be discussed at the workshop. For more information please see: http://www.educause.edu/camp053.

The group discussed further developments required to deploy Sympa in the FEDORA core environment. Currently, most of the Perl modules required to operate Sympa in the FEDORA core environment are not supported by FEDORA core developers. Naturally, the group desires more information from FEDORA core developers about future support of Perl modules required for Sympa supported by FEDORA core. Installing Sympa in the FEDORA core environment will require, at a minimum, installation of Perl Live Wwperl, Perl Linetools, Perl Template Toolkit, Perl LDAP, Perl SOAP - light, Perl DBV MySQL, Perl I/O Socket SSL, Perl SUIDPerl, Perl Live XML, Perl Live INTL, Perl Archive Zip, Perl FCGI, Apache MySQL and Monarch. For more information about these Perl modules please see www.cpan.org. Not all of these are available in the FEDORA core extra’s package. The group desires to develop an operable version of Sympa for FEDORA core release 5.0.1 and 5.1.b.

FEDORA core developers may, or may not, choose to support and maintain all of the prior mentioned Perl modules. So, the group must decide which of the Perl modules should be packaged for Sympa installation. The group determined that while it is desirable to have the developers of FEDORA core to support all of the Perl modules required for Sympa, it is acceptable for the group to provide a smaller segment of the Perl modules within Sympa’s installation guidelines for support by mailing list administrators using Sympa’s RPM’s. However, the group’s goal is to provide a Sympa installation (including all Perl modules) that is supported by FEDORA core.

The group also discussed the possible use of Fast CGI (FCGI) with a FEDORA core installation of Sympa. At this time Sympa supports CGI. For performance reasons, it is desirable to use FCGI in the FEDORA core/Sympa installation. Institutions with only a few mailing lists might not need to install FCGI with Sympa’s FEDORA core implementation, however, institutions with numerous mailing lists can benefit from FCGI in this environment. Sympa developers recommend that FCGI be integrated into Apache, but, FEDORA core developers have not yet expressed an interest in supporting FCGI. If a CGI package is to be used, it is desirable to use a non-interpreted CGI package.

Finally, the group discussed Sympa’s ability to support automatic updating of aliases when a new mailing list is created. The ability to update aliases when a new mailing list is created is desired especially in a web environment; although, mailing list administrators may choose to, in a more flexible manner, interpret an institution’s mailing list policies.

The group hopes to release the RPM package for Sympa/FEDORA core the week of June 27, 2005. This release should function with FEDORA core release version 4.

The next call is Wednesday, July 6, 2005 at 11:00AM ET**. **Please note the new call time. The call in number will be distributed with the agenda prior to the call.