[Spambayes] SpamBayes installation (or not)

[Richard Jones]

I was intrigued by the recent article about spam tools at 
http://home.dataparty.no/kristian/reviews/bayesian and Anthony's occasional 
prodding so I finally went to install spambayes locally. Oh, and I get a fair 
bit of spam ;)

It's not installed. I gave up trying to figure out how to install it after 
about five minutes of poking through the README.txt and INTEGRATION.txt 
files.

In my opinion, the current README should be replaced by something that:

1. hand-holds the user through the process of installing the software,
2. has zero technical discussions about how the software works, or how
   it's constructed.

I wouldn't say that the Roundup installation documents are perfect (see them 
online at http://roundup.sf.net/doc-0.6/installation.html), but they've been 
tweaked over a long period of time, and I understand that the software is now 
fairly painless to install. They're broken down into several sections:

Overview
  A short para or two describing what it is that the user is about to
  install. In Roundup, this is longer than I'd hope :(

Prerequisites
  Python version, any additional libraries.

Getting the software
  Just in case they got the readme from somewhere else.

For the Really Impatient
  If there's a really quick way to get the software up and running to play
  with it, then tell them how to.

Installation
  Step-by-step, with all the various options available clearly given. Give
  an indication how long it'll take to install.

Other sections
  Like platform-specific notes, upgrading existing installations, ...


I hope this helps. I look forward to installing spambayes some day :)


     Richard
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