Dear Maintainer,

I had an install running on mailman 2.1, which was working (mostly) fine.
Mailman 2.1 is no longer available, so I upgraded to mailman 3.

I followed the instructions in /usr/share/doc/mailman3/README.Debian which
worked, but there were no instructions for migrating the old archives to
hyperkitty.  I googled and found several sites purporting to say how to do
this but none of the ones I found was specific to Debian.

In the end, this site (https://docs.mailman3.org/en/latest/migration.html)
combined with some information from
https://lists.mailman3.org/archives/list/mailman-users@mailman3.org/thread/75BSXEULXUJ7XXJX5AYLDE3OD7RLNYYM/
allowed me to import the archives, using the following 2 commands per list:

sudo -u www-data /usr/share/mailman3-web/manage.py hyperkitty_import -l mylist@list.king.net.nz /var/lib/mailman/archives/private/mylist.mbox/mylist.mbox
sudo -u www-data /usr/share/mailman3-web/manage.py update_index_one_list mylist@list.king.net.nz

This was successful.  However, it took some hours of research and trial and
error to find it.  The important information that would have helped me a
great deal was 1. to run the import as the www-data user, and 2. that
manage.py is located in /usr/share/mailman3-web/ in Debian.

Since I'm moving my production list server on a Debian install, I expect
sufficient notes in README.Debian to upgrade from previous releases without
having to do extensive searches and trial and error.

I suggest the follwing is added at the end of
/usr/share/doc/mailman3-web/README.Debian.gz:

Migrating archives to mailman 3 and HyperKitty
==============================================

To migrate list archives from Mailman 2.1 to mailman3 and the HyperKitty
archiver, follow the instructions at
https://docs.mailman3.org/en/latest/migration.html.

The mailman command should be run as mailman_wrapper on Debian systems.  A
new empty list needs to be created with the name you want in mailman3, then
the following command will import the list from mailman 2.1:

mailman-wrapper import21 foo-list@example.com /var/lib/mailman/lists/foo-list/config.pck

The manage.py script is installed at /usr/share/mailman3-web/manage.py.  The
script should be run as the user www-data, so (given the caveate that your
existing mbox file is in good shape per note 2 on the migration
instructions,) the commands required to migrate the archives are:

sudo -u www-data /usr/share/mailman3-web/manage.py hyperkitty_import -l foo-list@example.com /var/lib/mailman/archives/private/foo-list.mbox/foo-list.mbox
sudo -u www-data /usr/share/mailman3-web/manage.py update_index_one_list foo-list@example.com

Hi,

Alex King <alex@king.net.nz> wrote on 17/11/2021 at 21:34:44+0100:

I'm sorry that you had to work a lot to find your way. I agree we should
have done something about it quite earlier.

Thanks a lot for offering this documentation. I'm currently waiting on
some dependencies that are missing to have mailman updated in
unstable. I'll include your suggestion in this release and then try to
have it included in bullseye's version.

With best regards,
--
PEB

Greetings.

I'm writing to you because I have a humanitarian request that I believe
could be incredibly impactful. I'm reaching out about the recent
devastating storm that tragically claimed many lives and affected numerous
individuals in Libya, including one of my clients. I would like to discuss
a proposal with you that could enable us to extend a helping hand to these
victims.

Looking forward to discussing this further with you.

Warm regards,
Mrs. Nathalie Herolds