Mick Johnson wrote:
Hi all
Firstly, thanks to everyone for their views over the past week or so. It's
quite clear that the Dspam community is heavily invested in the project.
A few points:
* The CVS is still up and running at cvs.nuclearelephant.com, and details on
login can be found at http://dspam.nuclearelephant.com/download.shtml.
* Patches are being folded in, and a new Beta will be forthcoming in CVS
* The Feature Suggestion/Request system exists at
http://dspam.nuclearelephant.com/features.shtml, however a combination of
the Wiki (see below) and the mailing lists may serve this better
* Frank's great Wiki at http://dspamwiki.expass.de/, seems like it contains
much of what you're looking for.
* The DNS servers for Dspam are constantly under attack - this is not under
SN control. I would like to revive some more of the mirrors to mitigate this
issue but am waiting to hear back from the owners of those domains.
* A central Bug Tracker is certainly possible, this is taking second
priority to getting the CVS back into shape
Cheers
Mick Johnson
Sensory Networks
- Central Repository - with community access
- Central Bug Tracker - with community access
- Fold in exist SN patches, Gentoo patches and any other patches
- Release a Beta with the patches and options in so we can start
testing
- Feature Suggestion - with community access, and place to discuss
wacky
ideas (I have some)
- Wiki (maybe Frank will donate the start of this?) - Example setups,
docs etc - with community access
- Reliable DNS Servers (the dspam website appears offline most of time)
- Invite Jonathan back into the party (if he can), the project misses
him
- Give us some ideas of what SN is doing with dspam
- Better mailing list storage/search function
- Establish contacts with distribution specific maintainers
With comments and direction on the following:
Move towards better distribution standardisation (you have at least
Gentoo, CentOS and FreeBSD actively here)
Structure/Roles for those willing to help out. Seems like the project
can be sub divided (particularly split away webgui) and lots of Doc +
testers
Release/Test schedule
Roadmap/Discussion of future ideas/features
Discuss the illegality's of copyright for those that contribute to
SN+Community project
Assurance of SN commitment to open source and that the community will
not be froze out
Take ownership and show us the way.....
If SN doesn't have the time/resource to commit to the dspam project
right now, then i'm not adverse to the Compiz/Beryl/Compiz idea. The
community is waiting to help make dspam a better product, that's all we
care about.
While I'm in a writing mood, I'd also like to thank everyone on the
dpsam lists for keeping the project alive this long. My particular
thanks goes to Steve for all the work with the Gentoo patches and those
with name suggestions for the forked project. 'espam' takes the votes,
even though I personally smile at PigeonHole each time i say it :-)
Maybe a pigeon can feature in the logo...
I await a positive Sensory Networks reply,
Paul
Mark Rogers wrote:
Steve wrote:
The last weeks here almost every one was talking about forking DSPAM.
Well... Sensory Networks replied and now every thing is quite again.
I was thinking the same thing. I was optimistic that the message from
SN indicated that there might be some involvement from them (and not
on an "early next year" timescale) but it's gone quiet again.
My opinion is that a fork would be worthwhile, if only to merge back
into the official source if/when SN wish to do so (or not if they
decide not).
Okay. Why this long mail? Well... I would love to see other people
on
the list implement stuff. I am sure that others are developers or
can
develop. What is holding you back to do things? I miss the time when
DSPAM was getting better and better with each release and where you
did not had to wait almost 1 year to get a new DSPAM release.
I think I found dspam just too late to have witnessed this, but it's
obvious from the passion people have about dspam that it was once
there.
As a coder I might be able to offer something, but my days of C
coding
are some time ago. I would very much like to look at the web
interface
though (although I'm happier in PHP than Perl). Maybe I could do some
documentation too.
So please all you out there using DSPAM and able to code: fire up
your dev environment and start coding on DSPAM. Add new features.
Fix
old known bugs (if you don't know them, then ask here and I am sure
you will get responses). Enhance DSPAM. Make it faster. Make it use
less memory. Add new storage engines. Etc...
What I'm missing here is a clear idea of where to put the resulting
code. Do we fork? Can we at least have a single repository of patches
and other enhancements?
Would SN be hostile to a fork? It seems to me that they might benefit
from it (they can merge the code back after all, and they don't seem
to have the resource to push dspam forward at the moment). If they
are
hostile to a fork then these mailing lists may disappear...
If you look at how Compiz forked to create Beryl, which later merged
back into Compiz once it was stable, then there might be a model we
can follow here.
I'm happy to see the "Feature Request" are still being seen, It
gives everyone a good idea of what direction the community wants DSpam
to go. Maybe the money aspect should be removed as SN is a corporation.
The idea behind it was to give Jonathan's some incentive but the small
sums that are/were posted aren't substantial enough to interest a
corporation. Would be cool if the donations for a given feature ended
up in the pockets of the developers who fulfilled the request (though I
doubt this is possible).
-Jeff Harris
