Mick Johnson wrote:
Sorry it's taken a while for me to get back to everyone on the topic of a
Dspam fork.
It's good to see the response even if belatedly; I doubt I'm the only
one who hoped that the discussion about forking would solicit a response!
Sensory Networks continues to maintain these mailing lists, the website, and
the mirror system (currently attempting to reconnect 2 of the disconnected
mirrors). I have 10 - 20 currently outstanding patches, depending on whether
you count by email or section of code, and we are attempting to schedule a
future release candidate.
Maintenance of the website and mailing lists is appreciated. However I
note that (unless I'm missing something) there's been no change to the
dspam website under SN's control, nor did the dspam acquisition merit
even a "Latest News" mention on SN's website, so you may appreciate the
feeling of neglect that has developed.
Regarding release candidates: the strength of open source is in the
"release early, release often" philosophy. At the very least having an
active and openly available CVS (SVN/Git/etc) repository is a minimal
requirement, I would have thought. If the standard 3.8.0 installation
procedure is "download the source, collect and apply a handful of
patches from the mailing lists, then build and install" then it's not
surprising that 3.8.0 hasn't been fully adopted.
My understanding up until these recent discussions was that about 90% of
users were fairly happy with 3.6.8, and a few were still testing 3.8.0. I
therefore saw no real urgency to push out the next release candidate, which
is likely to be 3.8.1, and still requires a high degree of testing.
I use 3.6.8 not because I don't want 3.8.0 but because I prefer to rely
on my distributions packages since in general they are well tested and
security patches are applied quickly. I also don't like installing build
tools on a production server and the easiest way to avoid that is
"apt-get install dspam".
Of course, Dspam is much more than the code, and the collaboration of the
community here is very important to us. Please keep the patches coming!
The collaboration of SN is equally important for dspam to succeed
(although rather less so for dspam-new/espam/whatever).
What version of dspam do SN use? Is it a standard 3.6.8 or 3.8.0 install
or is it "tweaked"? It's true of most open source packages that
development is done to "scratch an itch"; maybe the current releases
meet SN's needs without any changes or development, in which case I can
understand SN's lack of visible involvement recently, but if the status
quo suits SN then I would think that a fork is inevitable sooner or later.
--
Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0845 45 89 555
Registered in England (0456 0902) at 13 Clarke Rd, Milton Keynes, MK1 1LG
