[Mageia-dev] Mail aliases

[Michael Scherer]

H,

as you may have followed latest council meeting, people in the various
teams ( see what team below ) can now use aliases @mageia.org. 

The alias is your login @ mageia.org, forwarded to the email in ldap, as
entered in identity. Exact details can be found in sysadmin svn, but
that use simply ldap mail attribute ( for now ).

Spamassassin and greylisting have been deployed to be as spam free as
possible, with the downside of being too protective maybe.

Yet, the setup is not considered complete.
The issues have been two fold : 
- organizational
- technical

On the organizational level, we need for each team to have a list of
member, and know who in the team can receive the aliases. Then, this
must be entered in the ldap by a sysadmin ( long term plan are to
delegate this but in the meantime, someone has to do it ).

This also mean that team that are quite "informal" need some kind of
formalisation before having aliases. IE a process to decide who is in
the team, how to enter it, and so on.

So far, the team that have aliases as they were fully specified in ldap
are :
- packagers
- sysadmins

Web developers are expected to follow soon in 1 or 2 weeks ( if I am not
wrong, rda can correct me ), as well as i18n ( iirc, this is to be
discussed in the meeting tonight ). 

For the other teams, we need to have that informations before doing
anything, so do not fear, we do not plan to keep aliases just for the
technical groups, everybody count.

To get back on packagers ( as this is the goal of posting here ),
aliases is linked to submit privileges. So apprentices do not have the
aliases, and that should be a motivation to finish the work.

I would also remind that when you when you use the email to post
somewhere, you are one of the many public face of the project, so do not
forget it.

On the technical level, several people asked me "can I use the aliases
on $foo", with foo being : 
- bugzilla, 
- mailling list,
- etc.

Short answer : you can try and report. 
Long answer : it depends and will maybe be difficult.

You can use it outside of mageia.org infrastructure without problem.  

You can use it on the ml, if they are on mailman ( ie, all @mageia.org
ml ). You need to resubscribe. 

You cannot use it to log on anything for now, as this is either your
real email or your login. I would be in favor of trying to fix this, but
this may be long and hard.

The main issues will likely be bugzilla, as it use the real email from
ldap internally ( switching it should not be hard but requires work  ),
and sympa ( as sympa also use internally the email from ldap, not the
login ). 

We are aware of the various problem ( or at least, a subset of admins,
in some period of time are aware of a subset of the problems ) and plan
to solve them, but that may not be simple, so if you feel you can help,
the configuration are on svn, and we are open to suggestion. 

First step would be to make a full audit of what need to be done, and
later how it can be done.

If you have any issues, do not hesitate to open a bug for that, or ask
question on the usual channel, or here.

-- 
Michael Scherer