2025-07 sdarwin summary

Author: sdarwin

_posts/2025-07-10-SamsQ2Update.md

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+---
+layout: post
+nav-class: dark
+categories: sam
+title: Mailman3 and Website-V2
+author-id: sam
+---
+
+### Mailman3 Deployment
+
+The Boost mailing list has been in place for around 25 years. During at least the last 3 years we have been exploring an upgrade to mailman3 which is a completely new framework based on Django and multiple other components. The new server finally went live in June 2025 at the same URL: https://lists.boost.org.  
+
+Mail archives going back to 2004 were imported into the new system. Static file copies of all archives are also hosted at listarchives.boost.org.  
+
+Thanks to some organizational delays, there was more time to ensure a technically stable migration, discover potential problems and interact with the upstream open-source project maintainers. I was able to contribute documentation to the official Mailman Suite docs, switch the search engine from Elastic Search to Xapian (which they recommend), convert the cache to Redis, find a qcluster misconfiguration, submit a fix about an archive import bug, create new shell wrapper scripts for CLI execution, install logrotate, and more. 
+
+Hopefully the new server is more enjoyable to interact with than mailman2. It solves certain issues: posts appear almost instantly on lists.boost.org and they are emailed out quickly. UTF-8 characters render correctly. New features can be added.
+
+### Boost website boostorg/website-v2
+
+The new boost.org went live! After nearly 4 years of development. A major milestone. Switched over DNS.
+
+Also,  
+
+Enabled IPv6.  
+Installed horizontal pod autoscaler (HPA).  
+Nginx redirect from boost.io to boost.org.    
+Adjusted Fastly CDN settings for 'latest'. Fixing Fastly VCL commands to process 404s. Opened ticket, re-organized the order of the expressions.  
+Created QA environment. Actually using the cppal-dev environment. Re-DNS servers.  
+Discussing and planning a feature in website-v2 to improve doc page load times by a factor of 4, by caching doc pages in postgresql instead of always loading them across the network from S3.  
+Improved the install scripts for local developer workstations, specifically the logic and steps of the Linux install.  
+
+### Doc Previews and Doc Builds  
+
+A few Boost libraries depend on [Antora](https://antora.org/), and the number will expand in the future. An existing problem with Antora is that the component isomorphic-git doesn't support submodules, while all Boost libraries are submodules. 
+
+I have opened a draft pull request on isomorphic-git to include a subset of submodule capabilities, allowing it to operating on already-checked-out submodules. That would be sufficient to handle most cases of doc builds. Since the original author of isomorphic-git departed, there is at most a part-time maintainer. Review processes are somewhat slow. Further work needs to be done. But it's progressing and doesn't appear to be blocked, although there is a hurdle that a correct isomorphic-git update for submodules will need to modify 60+ git commands, each of which has a test suite and varying source code files.
+
+### boost-ci
+
+Nearly all CI jobs that use boost-ci set B2_CI_VERSION=1. We're now working on eliminating the need for this variable by making it a default. That will avoid an error when the variable isn't set properly. CI configuration becomes one step easier. Running reports to find which repos are affected. In-process.  
+
+### Infrastructure Monitoring
+
+The upstream Ansible roles to deploy Prometheus and Grafana were redesigned, and migrated from a 'role' to a 'collection'. In order to stay up-to-date and use the latest pip packages, I converted the Alliance's Prometheus/Grafana server to the new system and re-wrote the 'node exporter' modules which are customized to install on multiple operating systems, windows/macos/linux.  
+
+Deployed new server.  
+
+Further monitoring of Drone (number of runners). Postgresql (all db statistics).
+
+### Jenkins
+
+The latest Jenkins jobs send email notifications on failure. Working on designing adjustments to those steps to remove false-positives, which are caused by plugin bugs. It's valuable to receive accurate email notifications, allowing prompt investigation of the job issues.  
+
+Debugging Bloom. Added Decimal. Int128.
+
+Upgraded all plugins, server.
+
+### Boost release process boostorg/release-tools
+
+Boost release 1.88.0.  
+Worked with release managers to debug the publish scripts. Opened issues on website-v2 about the release process.  
+Helped multiple boost authors with various docs errors affecting superproject builds.  
+
+### Drone
+
+- Rebuilt vs2022 runners.  
+- IBM invoicing issues. not uncommon.  
+- IBM password expirations issues due to their configuration defaults.  
+- Disabled hyperthreading on runners.
+
+### GHA
+
+Rebuilt windows-2025 runners.
+
+### Benchmarks
+New dedicated benchmark runners for boostorg/bloom.
+
+
+