[maemo-community] Community annoucements

[From: Andrew Flegg]

On 28 June 2012 17:03, robert bauer <nybauer at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Wed, Jun 27, 2012 at 2:17 PM, Craig Woodward <woody at rochester.rr.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> I think the best solution here is to find a way to help prevent this
>> mistake from happening again. Perhaps a nice solution for this would be to
>> subscribe the community mailing list to the Council Blog feed.  That allows
>> an automated way for important messages to have one source and propagate to
>> multiple venues in a way that we can't accidentally forget.  Currently that
>> gets the occasional announcement for odd events (like CA, CC, etc) and
>> Council meeting minutes.  Does that sound reasonable?

Yes. Sounds very sensible.

> I certainly think it is reasonable.  The consideration is that we probably
> turn to X-Fade to do this, and I think he should be prioritized to finish
> the cOBS and then other things after that. [...]

Agree with your prioritisation, but I disagree with the assumption
which underlies it :-)

The technical design for this aggregation is:

  * Something monitors the Council blog RSS feed
  * If a new article is detected, turn it from HTML into plain text
    (using `links' perhaps)
  * Send an email with a 'from:' line which is subscribed to maemo-community
    to maemo-community at ...

The "from" line would, ideally, be council at maemo.org of course.

So, the only thing which requires *any* sort of official involvement
is someone who can subscribe council at maemo.org to maemo-community (so
that the emails from this bot/script won't get caught in moderation).
It could even be subscribed to not receive emails (so the council
don't get double-spammed through their forwarding).

If the council sets it up so that council at maemo.org is subscribed to
the mailing list, ANYONE can then implement a bot to monitor the RSS
feed and turn its posts into emails.

It then needs to be run on a regular basis (e.g. via a cronjob) on any
permanently Internet-connected machine. Ideally, this'd be something
under the Nemein support contract so it's backed-up/maintained; but
deploying it doesn't have to be related to writing it.

Anybody could write it. X-Fade could deploy it within 5 minutes if
it's well written, and if that's problematic, I'd be willing to host
it (if it's well written).

The source should also be in a sensible place, but putting it in the
garage project for the maemo.org source code would seem sensible. But
it wouldn't need to integrate into Midgard or even be written in PHP
(Perl would be what *I* would write it in, if I had time to do so).

Hopefully this'd give enough of a spec for:

  a) the council to subscribe the mail alias to the mailing list
  b) someone to write the actual script

HTH,

Andrew

-- 
Andrew Flegg -- mailto:andrew at bleb.org  |  http://www.bleb.org/