[Noffle-devel] Re: noffle

[Jim H. <jim...@ac...>]

On 20-Mar-2003 joh...@gm... wrote:
> I would like to assist you developing noffle.

Excellent! Thank you.

> I know that working together in an open-source project involves a great deal
> of self-responsibile working, but currently I feel that I need some help
> nevertheless.

If you haven't already, please join the noffle-devel mailing list. This is the
list for Noffle developers. It's pretty quiet, so don't worry about being
drowned in traffic.

Oh, and asking before you launch into anything is always a good idea on any
project.

> I read the latest TODO list in the current cvs-repository but the two
> "urgent" items on this list do not seem to be the "trivial job" for the
> unskilled worker.

I agree that 

 * Deal properly with headers split over several lines where the overall
   content of the header exceeds MAXCHAR characters (i.e. length of Str).

will be a non-trivial change and isn't a great place to start. But

 * Post: Only generate Reply-To: from From: if a configuration option set.

should be pretty simple. Reply-To generation happens at line 323 in post.c.
You'd need to add a new configuration access routine in
configfile.h/configfile.c; see the existing Bool routines, e.g.
Cfg_autoSubscribe().

The other thing on the list I would like to see done is some localisation work.
In particular, the pseudo-messages Noffle generates - e.g. the 'I'm not
fetching that group right now, but I will start' message - have their content
and subject hard-coded in English in pseudo.c. I would like to see that text
taken from files in /etc/noffle that the sysadmin can configure for local
conditions. I would also like to have standard translations for other
languages. Keep the hard-coded contents in case the message files don't exist.
Also, possibly we should search for the message files by first appending the
locale to the name, and picking up that file if it exists.

The next stage would be internationalisation of the Noffle source, so that the
usage message, error messages and even the log messages can have translations
provided. This should be a straightforward use of the GNU gettext() mechanism.

> By the way, is there a downloadable mbox archive file of the
> mailinglist noffle-users ?

Not that I know of.

> P.s: I wrote this email in english, though I have noticed nearly all
> team-members have their email-address in de domainspace. If the language
> in which you use to conversate is german, please let me know

There is a heavy German presence. Unfortunately, there's also one 'unwissendes
Englander mit nur Schule Deutschem', sufficient to see if Babelfish looks
sort-of plausible but nothing more. Me. So, (sorry) English please? And if
you're not that confident in your English, don't worry - I'm just sorry I have
such minimal German.

-- 
Jim Hague - jim...@in... (Work), ji...@be... (Play)
Never trust a computer you can't lift.