General development news

Discussion of items in the "What's New" log.

General development news

Postby jgonggrijp » Fri Aug 26, 2022 9:58 am

The spamgourmet admin team, consisting of Josiah and SysKoll, and the team that setup the spamgourmet github repository have got into direct communication. This should allow the second team to support the first team more effectively and, for example, give a better chance of answering easy support questions. Hopefully this will also mean that we can commit to supporting Josiah, SysKoll and other admins in future.

This also means that we have an official clear way for people to get involved and help the project: Come to the GitHub repo and submit pull requests. We would really appreciate help from anyone who has real experience with any of exim, perl, MySQL, DNS and networking or email systems generallly. If you are just a fan without any programming skills then telling people elsewhere who would want to help and making sure that support questions here on the board get friendly answers are probably the best ways to do that.

Coming up: static code checking and opinionated formatting

The spamgourmet code was written quite a while ago when software standards were different. Static code checking and "opinionated formatting" (also known as autoformatting) are now standard features of development and we would like to take advantage of them to make development of spamgourmet easier, faster and more fun.

When we introduce static code checking, there will be formatting changes throughout the code base, changing at least 70% of the over 300 files. If you have a fork of spamgourmet with your own changes and you want to keep tracking the master branch, this can easily cause difficult merge conflicts. Fortunately, there are two possible ways to work cleanly around this:

  • If you have a patch that you want to share back with core Spamgourmet and which is more or less ready, consider submitting it to us soon. We might be able to merge it before we reformat the code.
  • Otherwise, it will still be possible to submit your patch afterwards. We will provide guidance on how to do this as smoothly as possible when the time is there.

This message has been copied to the GitHub repo as well.
Last edited by jgonggrijp on Sat Aug 27, 2022 4:50 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: General development news

Postby lwc » Fri Aug 26, 2022 9:28 pm

This is wonderful news! Some time ago it seemed Spamgourmet was at the end of its road, but now there's a chance it'll actually move forward and be better than ever!

Yet as someone who contributed years of support, had great discussions and even convinced Josh to add feature requests at the time and also posted to Spamgourmet's GitHub, may I ask how did you manage to achieve this lucrative status of direct communication?
How did you break the barrier of Joshia replying to neither forum posts, e-mails nor PMs? He hasn't even opened a forum topic in more than a year. Don't get me wrong, I'm very thankful he didn't shut down the service, but never understood his stand on it.
As for SysKoll (with two Ls), he hasn't written in the forum since 2020 and was last logged in at April.
Therefore this post suggested to locate him physically, is that how you did it? Although I assume it wasn't something as drastic, just this lucky break?
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Re: General development news

Postby jgonggrijp » Sat Aug 27, 2022 9:29 pm

(Thanks for pointing out the typo, corrected now.)

It is a long and intricate history, but one of the ingredients is that we "opportunistically" approached Josiah, by PM, at a time when he was playing close attention to the BBS. You can read here and here for some background.
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Re: General development news

Postby anon090526 » Sat Sep 03, 2022 4:32 pm

Oh Happy Day!
I'm an old retired s/w engineer, but of the skills you mention, I only have a smattering of perl, very stale. And I'm aware of, but never used, git.
So I'll stay out of the way wrt active contributions. But I'll continue to provide financial support to SG, and up that if anything is needed to make this effort succeed.

Thank You!
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Re: General development news

Postby michaeldlr » Thu Sep 15, 2022 11:38 am

Hi anon090526

Please don't feel excluded from coming and helping if you think you lack some of the skills. Having programmed in perl in the past is more than many involved right now. GitHub has a web interface where you can just directly edit files and then submit them to be accepted. If you are getting involved and helping and don't find you learn git yourself then we're definitely happy to teach it.

Please get in touch with one of us directly if you can - e.g. I've just PMed you a LinkedIn link for me or you can contact us by making a GitHub ticket. Most communication is on signal so if you send me your phone number we can chat there.

I've made a llist of useful skills we need in the GitHub ticket.

Michael
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Re: General development news

Postby r2d2 » Thu Oct 13, 2022 10:49 pm

This is really great news. Thanks for connecting all the people and getting this off the ground. I really appreciate all the effort.
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