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.