Le 2014-11-22 11:00, dspam-devel@lists.sourceforge.net a écrit : > What are the skills required to take on maintenance? > > I have done a bit of C and perl coding and I've used dspam in the > past. I would like to use it again. Off course, I really never tried > to grasp a code base as big s dspam... But somehow, I feel tempted. > And I was really happy when I used it years ago. It is really a shame > it came to this point...
Before talking about skills I think you need to ask yourself if the objective of the software are aligned with you. This software already have a large userbase and users would be lost if the software were to change of focus. Taking on maintainance needs some commitment. Now don't worry too much about the codebase, these things can be learned. You can start by looking at easy bugs that are reported and fix those. For instance typos so that you will get familiar with the directory structure of dspam. There is probably also a bit of bugs with patches included. You can take a look at those but I know some are a bit complex. I think the most important is to pay attention at the security side. dspam is made to run on server and work on untrusted input (malformed message can reach dspam). This means you need to look at any patch thinking about all the things that might happen. Anything should be bounded in size: no strcpy, strlen etc. since the input could be arbitrarely large. I think the best for dspam would be if several people could be actively maintaining it. There could be code review to increase the likelyhood of catching a bug in a patch for instance. After it's just C, some bits of HTML and perl I think for the webfrontend, SQL for the database and be able to read an RFC and follow it to the letter. The best way would be to host a clone of the git repository somewhere else and start fixing the bugs in the database. Then after some time you can show you work and ask the domain owner to let you maintain dspam officially. What you would have done before would be proof that you are capable. Feel free to advertise your repository, I'm sure there would be many users willing to give it a try. If you come to look at the patches I wrote (most of them are not applied yet and sit in the bugtracker), I'd be happy to answer any questions you might have about them. Best regards, Thomas [maintainer of dspam Debian package] ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Download BIRT iHub F-Type - The Free Enterprise-Grade BIRT Server from Actuate! Instantly Supercharge Your Business Reports and Dashboards with Interactivity, Sharing, Native Excel Exports, App Integration & more Get technology previously reserved for billion-dollar corporations, FREE http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=157005751&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk _______________________________________________ Dspam-devel mailing list Dspam-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dspam-devel
