Project status? Updating to supported components.

[neuhaus]

Hello, in particular hello @maxking !

We're currently using this very useful project for our mailman deployment,
however I'm wondering why this project still uses quite outdated components like
Postgres 12 and mailman-web and mailman-core 0.4 (mailman 0.5 was released a year ago).

There have been some pull requests and suggestions in the past to remedy this but they haven't been merged. What are the plans to improve the situation? Can we help?

Cheers!

[maxking]

The overall proeject has stalled a little due to the time commitments needed from my end, so I am sorry for that to everyone who relies on this project.

About the updates, I was some time ago thinking of a better way to make the updates to the image and not have people doing a git pull break due to that. I think the current install instructions are asking people to use the existing compose files instead of providing a example file that others manage.

Most difficult part for me to grok is how would someone update things. Say I bump the repo to use the latest postgres, how does someone using this project upgrade to that version if they are already using it?

I might already have broken some people in the past by having to update the postgres to 12 due to compat issues but I have never upgraded willingly to latest and greatest.

I believe there is some need for automation to upgrade existing installations after which I will feel much better to regularly bump database versions which people with less knowledge of docker and databases can use. People with sufficient knowledge haven't really blocked on this repo using outdated versions.

Does that make sense to you?

[neuhaus]

Yes, absolutely.

For the automation of postgresql upgrades across major versions, switching to the https://hub.docker.com/r/pgautoupgrade/pgautoupgrade image (git repo: https://github.com/pgautoupgrade/docker-pgautoupgrade) could be a solution.

For the upgrades of mailman, I'm not qualified to offer a solution. Can mailman 0.5 deal with mailman 0.4 files?

[neuhaus]

The version numbers could be moved into a .env file:

image: maxking/mailman-core:${MAILMAN_VERSION:-0.4}

Then an update script can look at the versions in the .env file, do the necessary steps to perform the upgrade and finally upgrade the version numbers in the .env file.

[maxking]

Makes sense on both I suppose. I am willing to accept PRs updatnig to pgautoupdate image and using the .env to define versions. Mailman upgrades I can handle, it usually will auto update and if there is a backwards incompat change we release in Mailman, i'll handle it.