New mlmmj website and development

Hi, everybody,

I'm pleased to announce that the new mlmmj website is up and running! I encourage you to have a look at it. Anyone interested in having an account to be able to help maintain it, please let me know! It's where it's always been: http://mlmmj.org/

This includes a bug tracker. I will be adding bugs and feature requests that I know about over the next few days, and I encourage others to do so also. My next priority is working towards a release that includes recently-implemented features as well as minor bug fixes, so I'm interested in hearing about as many bugs as we know about. The tracker is here: http://mlmmj.org/bugs

The mlmmj source code repository is also now available. I will be using Mercurial as the 'official' source code control for the project. The repository can be browsed online, or accessed through the Mercurial commandline tools using this URL: http://mlmmj.org/hg/mlmmj

I know a number of people prefer git. Happily, using the hggit extension, I should be able to interact losslessly with a git repository with little trouble, and I am happy to try that. I seem to remember someone volunteered a while back to set up a git repo. If you're still keen, speak up again, and we'll see what we can work out!

Finally, if you're interested in seeing bugs and commits as they happen, you can subscribe to new mailing lists [email protected] and [email protected] for this. This is detailed at: http://mlmmj.org/lists

I hope this new site and infrastructure will raise the profile of mlmmj, help us keep on top of bug fixes and change requests, and attract more users and developers to this great project.

A big thank-you to Wolf Bergenheim for generously hosting all this, and for the time and effort he's put into setting it all up.

Happy hacking!

Ben.

Hello Ben and Wolf,

Sorry for this belated answer!

Nevertheless do I feel the need to pay my kudos for this work. It's really great to see that you're taking care of our baby and the infrastructure around it, so very well.

Thanks,
Mads Martin

Mads Martin Joergensen, http://mmj.dk
"Why make things difficult, when it is possible to make them cryptic
 and totally illogical, with just a little bit more effort?"
                                 -- A. P. J.

Hi Ben,

Thanks for your efforts. I've been using mlmmj for a while now and it works pretty well. I have noticed a few little annoyances that I haven't really followed up until now but I'd like to change that and help where I can.

For instance yesterday I was trying to find an issue where I was not getting notified of unsubscriptions due to bouncing. In the end it turned out to be me having the wrong list control directory settings for one of my lists. I'll try to take a look through my notebook and see if I can come up with a list of these "annoyances".

However whilst I was looking for the cause of my problem I spent a bit of time looking through mlmmj-maintd.c to trace what it was supposed to be doing at each step. Whilst doing this I spotted a number of minor issues in the mlmmj-maintd.c code.

With that in mind I would be grateful if you could let me know your preferred way of working/review. I could just post the patches to the mailing list (in hg email format). I'm a little concerned that testing some of these changes is going to be difficult because they do involve a number of corner cases that shouldn't happen in normal operation. Most changes are fairly small however and IMHO they will add value to the long term stability of mlmmj.

If patches are of interest and do prove useful I'll see if I can find some time to review other parts of mlmmj over the next month or two.

Let me know your preferred way of working because I'm wary of sending a chunk of patches to a mailing list unannounced.

Regards

Richard

Patches would be great. As the original author of mlmmj, I often read them and feel happy about all the nice work people are putting into the project. And I know others like to peak at patches too :)

Mads Martin Joergensen, http://mmj.dk
"Why make things difficult, when it is possible to make them cryptic
 and totally illogical, with just a little bit more effort?"
                                 -- A. P. J.

Help is always welcome.

Great. After I get 1.2.18 out the door, hopefully before much longer, I want to focus on 'annoyances' for a bit, such as improving the error reporting and logging, including reasons for unsubscriptions when notification emails are sent, etc..

Yep, just email them to the list or to me personally; just use your judgement regarding which you think is best. If they are small changes, I'm likely to whack them in the repo almost straight away, as I like to get things into version control quickly. I just try to ensure that each change has been looked at by two competent people and given at least some amount of testing before it goes into a release candidate. If a review requires changes to be made, which has to be in a new changeset, it's no big deal!

I would recommend that any change which might be 'controversial' you discuss on the mailing list. Or any change which will take you a lot of time and effort. I don't want to waste your time by having you work on a change that I don't want to commit for some reason.

Another thing I will be doing after 1.2.18 is trying to set up some automated testing. This will pave the way for making larger changes to Mlmmj's architecture with more confidence that things aren't being broken. Hopefully I will be able to simulate a lot of these corner canses when I do that. So, even if we can't easily test them yet, let's make a list of them, so we can write tests for them later without having to remember what they are.

No bug is too small to fix. And to my mind, a program isn't stable if it works most of the time. Most programs work most of the time. It's how well a program works under pressure, when things around it start breaking, and in the corner cases, that differentiates a stable program from an unstable one.

Thanks.

Smiles,

Ben.