[spambayes-dev] Re: Offer to Help / Development Participation

[Richie Hindle]

David, Darrell,

[David]
> I'm very impressed with your work and would be glad to help [...]

[Darrell]
> [...] any development help you need don't hesitate to drop me a line.

Many thanks for the offers!  Maybe other developers would like to make
specific suggestions (hence I've forwarded this to the spambayes-dev
mailing list), but there's a whole bunch of things that you could do,
starting with the non-technical:

 o Try to reproduce bugs that we're having trouble reproducing; see the
   bug list at http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=61702&atid=498103
   (807217 is my personal hate figure).

 o Help with testing; we're only able to test within our own environments,
   and only the developers who are around at the time of a release are
   able to do even that.  Some "real people" who could help test in their
   environments would be a big help.

 o Help improve the website; there's a Wiki page about that at
   http://www.entrian.com/sbwiki/WebSiteDevelopment

 o Help improve the documentation, especially for the non-Outlook
   applications (POP3 proxy, IMAP filter, Notes filter, sb_filter).

 o Help out newbies on the mailing list.

 o Make contributions to the Wiki, http://www.entrian.com/sbwiki - any
   hints and tips, scripts, recipes etc.

 o Taking part in discussions on the developer's mailing list at
   spambayes-dev at python.org.  You don't need to be a developer to
   participate, you just need to have a decent grasp of the project and
   have opinions about how it should be developed.

For those with programming skills, there's even more you could help with,
even without in-depth knowledge of the code.  The code's pretty
accessible, and developers are always glad to answer questions about how
it all works.  Here's a small list off the top of my head:

 o Test patches, tidying them up, making them fit the coding standard
   (http://www.python.org/peps/pep-0008.html) if they don't already.
   See http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=61702&atid=498105

 o Fix bugs - turning a bug report into a patch makes it far more likely
   to be fixed!

 o Improve our unit tests, or help develop an acceptance test framework.

 o Once you've got a handle on how the code works, implement feature
   requests.

 o Backport bugfixes from the head onto the bugfix branch, although our
   branch strategy is a little up in the air at the moment, so that's one
   for the future.

 o Help with sailing our fleet of luxury yachts from the Caribbean to the
   Med for the Spring season... or am I dreaming again?  8-)

There are probably a dozen other things that I haven't thought of.

-- 
Richie Hindle
richie at entrian.com