Re: Spam.el tutorial

[Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com>]

On Sun, 14 Dec 2003, zedek@gnu-rox.org wrote:

> Spam.el sounds really cool but according to many people I have been
> talking with, spam.el is way far from being simple to understand and
> so to setup.
> 
> Even clever people I know, they are good at emacs lisp, agree with
> the fact, you, Ted, have produced such an awesome and complex code,
> that even them can't really understand :)

I agree.  The problem has two sides:

1.  Managing spam is HARD.  Sure, you can have a simplistic
    "everything to the spam folder" approach, but most people quickly
    ask for refinements.

2.  The Emacs customization functionality, especially concerning Gnus,
    is really insufficient as it stands to produce easy configuration
    screens.

I don't think we can reduce (1) so we have to improve (2).
Personally, I think it would be nice and not too hard to produce a
wizard-like interface for Gnus.  I just don't have the time to do it
right now.  Such an interface would have to have the concept of
screens and moving back and forth between them; also it should be able
to detect nonsense configurations, branch between different paths, and
have lots of help text.

If people have the patience to wait for me to finish my changes to
spam.el (we're approaching a point where it will have all the
features I wanted last year, when I started work on it) then I can
jump into this problem.  It should be fun.  But please, if anyone
else has ideas and would like to do this work, do it!

Anyhow, regarding tutorials.  They are fine, but they have limited
uses.  Specifically regarding spam.el, a tutorial would have to cover
a very basic configuraiton to be useful to all users.  There are big
differences between all the backends, all the ways you can check
incoming mail, and all the ways you can move spam/ham around.  I
think a tutorial should get the user started, but it shouldn't set an
expectation of "this is how Ted does his spam setup, so you should
too."  I've received a lot of good ideas from people who have
unorthodox setups.

That being said, I would love to see a spam.el tutorial.  I would
help with it, but my next goal after tonight's commit is to update
the CVS manual.  So don't wait for me :)

> So I think a tutorial is something useful to show people different
> way to set all things up. The most important thing is to show people
> a maximum of different setup according to way you, gnus users, read
> your mails.

You could do that.  It would be terribly confusing to users, to be
given so many different and usually mutually exclusive approaches.
Be careful.

> So this covers customize and plain emacs lisp setup. I mean there is
> a big hit on the fact some people (like me) are totally lost(or
> doesn't like) customize stuff and prefer doing their own receipt.

I'll add more examples in the manual of how to do things without
customize.  I don't see the big deal, though.  Use customize once,
then look at the variable and you can see the format easily.  But
then again, I'm used to spam.el arcana.

> So I think, if people can post here, in this thread, the portion of
> their own spam.el setup, would be a good start to produce a final
> document. Posting emacs lisp with comments explaining users choice
> is higly recommended though.

I would, but is there a way to extract all the Gnus group and topic
parameters and put them in gnus-parameters?  That would be nice,
otherwise it's hard for me to show my full setup.

> P.S: if this topic is serious (that is if there are posters), I can
> then take the stuff and write the final document.

That would be great.

Ted