[spambayes-dev] How can we support Mark?

[Meyer, Tony]

[Skip]
> Every morning I come in to a slew of SF reports related to problems 
> with the Spambayes Outlook plugin.  Each day they seem to get more 
> esoteric.

That's because he's fixed the simple ones ;)

[Skip]
> Now we are starting to see a bunch related to Unicode 
> problems.  While I'm sure Mark is technically capable of 
> handling all this, I'm afraid he's swamped now or will be in the
> near future.

It seems fairly clear that one reason the 003 release was delayed was
because he had to deal with all of those as well.  (Although I'm sure
there were other reasons that don't involve spambayes).

[Tim] 
> I'm sure it helps when others close duplicate bug reports, 
> enter emailed bug reports into the tracker, and reply to 
> emailed bug reports pointing the poster to the relevant 
> tracker issue.

One thing I would add to this is keeping an eye out for FAQs and adding
to them when necessary.  (Not that there is any guarantee that the FAQ
will be read, but there's a chance).  I must admit that I tried to do
the things Tim said when the swamping first began and have become much
slacker at it recently...I'll try to improve on this (now that they are
different errors, it might not be quite as monotonous).

By the way, the autoreply thing should probably be updated since the 003
binary appears to be working regardless of Windows/Outlook version.  I
presume this needs to be changed somewhere apart from in the website
cvs?

> It's great that the Outlook plugin is so popular, but I 
> don't want to 
> see Mark burn out supporting what can only be viewed as a labor of 
> love.  What can we do to offload him?  Is there some way to recruit 
> more Windows-savvy Python programmers to the Spambayes fold?

Hopefully as more people use spambayes, a percentage of those will be
interested in doing development.  I think the Outlook plugin is
particularly difficult though, because (a) it works pretty well already
(so you don't want to muck it up!), (b) Outlook/MAPI is *so* complicated
and 'interestingly' documented, and (c) the plugin code is quite
complicated, and unless you're familiar with it, it takes a while to
find a bug.

=Tony Meyer