On Wed, 2020-07-22 at 21:53 -0700, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote: > You could even fork the SpamAssassin code if you like, you know. In > fact, let's do that. We will make a new fork and call it the > "SpamAssasin-N-W" short for SpamAssassin Non Wussy, put it up on > Sorceforge for download, and just mirror the regular SpamAssassin > distribution when new releases come out with the exception of this > change. > That would be fine for the Perl source code, but in case you didn't notice, the terms-we-must-not-use ALSO appear in visible text, i.e. names of base rules, which can't be hidden from SA users. Changing them WILL break some private rules written by SA users who don't subscribe to this mailing list and so will not be expecting any such change.
AFAICT this side effect was not considered by the SA maintainers until the name of one base rule was changed a week or so back and some list members' rules were broken by it. I'm not blaming the maintainers because something like that is very easy to miss: its a fair bet that base rule names no not appear anywhere in SA source code. OK, Post SA 4.0 it appears that there's a plot to maintain both old and new-style rule names for a while, but I predict that there will be much wailing and gnashing of teeth from those who are not on this list when either some name change is missed or further down the line the old names vanish and all those who never update software get caught out. Martin, who is a retired professional developer and has seen this sort of thing before.
