[gotmail] Call for help: testers/debuggers/developers

[paul cannon]

On Fri, Oct 24, 2003 at 10:21:39PM -0700, John Fruetel wrote:
> According to the Hotmail web page, Hotmail is going to have a major
> revamping by the end of November.  I'm guessing this is going to
> seriously break Gotmail.

It almost certainly will. Thanks for the heads-up.

> I use Gotmail pretty extensively and I would miss it dearly.  Is
> there going to be a concentrated effort to get it fixed if/when it
> breaks in November?  If so, I don't mind doing whatever I can to
> help keep it working.

I'm afraid I don't expect to have heaps of spare time during that
period. I will do whatever I can to keep Gotmail running.

A concentrated effort of Gotmail users would be of immeasurable help
in keeping things going. If there is to be such an effort, I think it
would be best coordinated using this list.

Here is what would help the effort along the most, for all who are
interested in helping:

BEFORE GOTMAIL BREAKS

 * Developers: Try to become familiar with the way Gotmail works. It's
   Perl code, so it's inherently less than perfectly readable, but it's
   understandable with a little effort. Run gotmail with --debug, and
   compare the HTML in /tmp/gotmail_log with the code that processes it.
   You'll need to be familiar with regular expressions. If you're not,
   consider studying them; they are extremely useful in all languages.

 * Developers: I would like to add some extra admins to the Gotmail
   project on Savannah, who can commit to CVS. If you feel capable, are
   interested, and have some time to spend helping with Gotmail, email
   me off-list.

AFTER GOTMAIL BREAKS

 * Any Users: If you see Gotmail fail in an odd way more than once in a
   row, send a bug report to me (see instructions on how to do this most
   effectively; basically, run 'gotmail --debug 2>&1 | tee log_file',
   and email me with a description of what seems to be wrong. Attach
   that log_file AND /tmp/gotmail_log which is created by 'gotmail
   --debug' AND a copy of the .gotmailrc used.  Star out passwords in
   the last, of course.

   The /tmp/gotmail_log contains the actual HTML and headers sent by
   Hotmail, so debuggers and developers can know in which places Gotmail
   is breaking.

   Also, if no one else has described the Gotmail behavior you see, send
   a mail to this list explaining what happened.

   I will try to sift through the bug reports and post to this list with
   useful information that will help those trying to debug.

 * Debuggers: If you do some debugging work on Gotmail after it has
   broken, and you solve at least part of the problems introduced, email
   this list and explain what problem you solved, and how you did it
   (both an English explanation and appropriate code snippets/diffs).

ANYTIME

 * Developers: If you have some Python proficiency, and would like to
   assist in developing the next generation of Gotmail (development
   name: gotfemail), email me off-list. I have some pretty ambitious
   plans for this project, and depending on how much is actually
   implemented, Hotmail breakages should be either self-fixing or very
   simple to fix.  I've done some work on making a generic library for
   this sort of job (so the fetchyahoo people and others might be
   interested), and some preliminary work on embedding the Javascript
   interpreter from the Mozilla project.

-- 
.------------------------------------------------------------.
| paul cannon                                 address@hidden |
|                             http://people.debian.org/~pik/ |