GroupServer 14.06 — Slivovica shots at sunset

Authors:Michael JasonSmith;
Contact:Michael JasonSmith <mpj17@onlinegroups.net>
Date:2014-06-03
Organization:GroupServer.org
Copyright:This document is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International License by OnlineGroups.net.

Introduction

The major changes to GroupServer in the Slivovica release include making the system easier to install, better at handling email, and improving the reliability. You can get Slivovica immediately.

Changes to GroupServer

For new installations of GroupServer the most important change is the updated buildout recipes, that should make the process of installing GroupServer more robust. For existing systems DMARC support has been added, as well as improvements to how incoming SMTP is handled. Finally there have been many other minor code improvements.

Updated buildout recipes

GroupServer itself is installed using four recipes that are used by Buildout. All four recipes have been improved. There is now a base recipe class that is shared by the recipes, and unit-tests have been added to ensure the recipes work as expected. Specific improvements include the following.

  • The recipe that creates the Postfix configuration has been updated, fixing a problem that Bill found.
  • The recipe that crates the PostgreSQL tables now uses the setuptools package to extract the SQL files from the different modules. The modules are now passed into the recipe from Buildout, rather than being written in the recipe.
  • The creation of the GroupServer site is now simpler, as only the site-administrator is created during installation. This solves many issues with the email-address of the normal group-member conflicting with the email address of the site administrator.

DMARC Support

With the Slivovica release of GroupServer messages are more likely to be received by people whose email is provided by hosts that implement strict DMARC. With strict DMARC messages are checked to ensure that message was actually sent from the host listed in the From address. All mailing-lists (including GNU Mailman, Google Groups, and Yahoo! Groups) modify the message before sending it out, and this would cause the DMARC check to fail.

Like most other mailing lists, GroupServer now rewrites the From address if the group member uses an email provider that implements strict DMARC. The new address includes the name of the sender, and the ID of his or her profile (see Feature 4108). This ensures that the person who sent the message can still be identified, and email message will still get through.

Incoming SMTP

With the Slivovica release of GroupServer email messages are correctly sent to GroupServer when it is running on a non-standard port. Messages are received by Postfix, which then uses the smtp2gs programme to add the message to GroupServer. Previously manual intervention was needed if GroupServer was listening to a non-standard port.

Now all components of GroupServer correctly handle the port that is set in the configuration file when GroupServer is first set-up. This includes the recipe that creates the alias file for Postfix, the smtp2gs script that uploads the email message, and the gs.form library that smtp2gs uses to connect to GroupServer.

Minor code improvements

Four components have undergone minor updates for Slivovica.

Add member:
Fixed an error with the dependencies of the product that added a member to a group.
Site style:
Some errors in the CSS have been fixed.
mbox importing:
The code that imports mbox files has been updated, and it now uses the same core code as the smtp2gs script.
Starting public groups:
Public groups are now visible on the homepage of the site as soon as they are started, closing Bug 4105.

In addition the following general changes have been made to GroupServer.

  • Three fundamental productsgs.core, gs.dmarc, and gs.form — have been published to PyPI.
  • Sphinx is now used to generate the documentation for gs.config, gs.core, gs.database, gs.dmarc, gs.form, and gs.group.messages.add.smtp2gs.
  • Unit tests have been added to many of the products that make up GroupServer. These tests make it more likely that these components that make up GroupServer will work correctly now and in the future.
  • Where possible Python 3 support has been added to the products that make up GroupServer. The main change has been to switch to Unicode-text by default. While not all products have been updated, many have.
  • Strict mode has been turned on in more of the JavaScript modules that support the GroupServer interface. Code written with strict-mode turned on is more likely to be correct, and is executed more quickly in modern browsers.
  • Finally, more code now raises errors, rather than relying on assert statements. As these errors should never happen hopefully no-one will notice a difference.

Get Slivovica

To get Slivovica go to the Downloads page for GroupServer and follow the GroupServer Installation documentation. Those who already have a functioning installation can update an existing GroupServer system.

Update an Existing GroupServer System

To update a system running the Ouzo release of GroupServer (14.03) to Slivovica (14.06) carry out the following steps.

  1. Download the Slivovica tar-ball from the GroupServer download page.

  2. Uncompress the tar-ball:

    $ tar cfz groupserver-14.06.tar.gz
    
  3. Change to the directory that contains your existing GroupServer installation.

  4. Copy the new version-configuration files to your existing GroupServer installation:

    $ cp ../groupserver-14.06/[vz]*cfg  .
    
  5. In your existing GroupServer installation run:

    $ ./bin/buildout -n
    
  6. Restart your GroupServer instance.