[ANN] fm.rb 0.5.0 - program to split fm newsletters

[Josef 'Jupp' SCHUGT]

Hi!

I am proud to announce the availability of fm.rb 0.5.0 (Shamshiel).

First of all (and to avoid that people are dissapointed because fm.rb
does not run on their system):

WHAT DOES FM.RB NEED?
=======================

While fm.rb is written so that from the side of Ruby you only need a
recent installation (i.e. version 1.8 or later) is sufficient, it
relies on external software that needs to be in place:

* To obtain the messages fm.rb requires an MDA (mail delivery
agent) that is capable of piping messages through external
programs. Alternatively you can store the message and pipe it
manually but that should be considered a last resort.

* fm.rb does logging so a Unix with syslog is needed.

* To deliver the messages a local mail server is needed.

The typical MDA is procmail so the web page explains how to use
fm.rb together with that program.

WHY HAS FM.RB BEEN WRITTEN?
=============================

I came across several programs for splitting these newsletters but
none of these seemed to fit my needs.

I wanted a program that creates an e-mail for every announcement and
article in the freshmeat newsletter and allows a mail program to
easily filter according to the category a program belongs to. I also
wanted that the mails are generated in such a way that
thread-enabled mail programs display releases of a certain program
as a thread.

In addition to this I wanted the program to be able to generate
messages in text/plain (Plain Text), text/html (Rich Text) and
multipart/alternative (Plain and Rich Text) format.

All these major goals have been achieved now so i guess it is time
for a public announcement. Follow details:

WHAT IS FM.RB GOOD FOR?
=========================

fm.rb parses FreshMeat newsletters, generates a mail for each item
of the article and the announcement section thereby generating some
useful message header fields and re-formatting the text so that is
better fits the needs of text mode mail user agents. It also adds
the declaration of the character set (Latin-1) that is missing in
the freshmeat newsletter.

The header fields generated are References and X-Trove-Category.

* The single References line allows modern mail user agents to
provide a thread view of all releases of a program. This even
works if the program name changes because fm.rb relies on
freshmeat's project URL that is not influenced by such a change
of name.

* The single X-License line (only present for announcements)
contains the license the program is released under.

* A X-Trove-Category line contains a software map category the
given program falls into. Mails concerning articles do not
contain this. Mails concerning software may contain many of
these fields, the presence of at least one is guaranteed. If the
project has not yet categorized itself the value "none provided"
is used. X-Trove-Category simplifies filtering the messages
according to the category the software belongs to.

A feature that has not originally been planned but that turned out
to be useful is that version 0.5.0 now is capable of hyperlinking
the trove categories that are provided to the corresponding
freshmeat URLs. A program that is capable of playing a CD is a
program from the "Multimedia" field, "Sound/Audio" category, "CD
Audio" subcategory, "CD Playing" section. Each part of the
categorization is hyperlinked to the corresponding freshmeat URL.
This makes it easier to look up similar applications at different
levels of similarity. Note that this feature is not available for
text/plain.

Another feature is that (for known licenses) a hyperlink to the
license is generated (for all versions).

When using HTML message parts the default format is such that the
message starts with a headline containing the full name of the
release that is hyperlinked to the corresponding freshmeat release
URL.

I hope I did not forget to mention any major feature of fm.rb :->

AVAILABILITY
==============

fm.rb is available at

http://dwd.da.ru/software/ruby/fm.html

It took me quite some time to collect the URLs for the Licenses and
Trove Categories. Please report any problems with them ASAP to the
From of this message.

I use fm.rb on a daily basis; it seems not to contain any major bug
but if you find one please communicate it immediately.

Josef 'Jupp' Schugt

Follows sample message ('mononoke.linux.dd' is the local system's
domain - the 'dd' TLD should not be in use any more; it was assigned
to the former GDR):


Received: from localhost.localdomain (mononoke.linux.dd [127.0.0.1])
by mononoke.linux.dd (8.12.11/8.12.11) with ESMTP id j3ULPkFV013942
for <jupp@localhost>; Sat, 30 Apr 2005 23:26:41 +0200
Date: Sat, 30 Apr 2005 23:26:41 +0200
X-Trove-Category: Communications :: Email :: Filters
X-Trove-Category: Software Development :: Libraries :: Perl Modules
Message-Id: <1114896401.47869-spamassassin-release-details-for-jupp@freshmeat.net>
From: (e-mail address removed)
User-Agent: fm.rb 0.5.0 [Shamshiel; Plain Text]
Subject: SpamAssassin 3.0.3
X-License: The Apache License 2.0
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1

SpamAssassin is an extensible email filter that is used to identify
spam. Once identified, the mail can then be optionally tagged as spam
for later filtering. It provides a command line tool to perform
filtering, a client-server system to filter large volumes of mail, and
Mail::SpamAssassin, a set of Perl modules allowing SpamAssassin to be
used in a wide variety of email systems.

http://freshmeat.net/projects/spamassassin/

*CHANGES*

This release fixes possible memory bloat from large AutoWhitelist db
files. It fixes a bug where user defined rules scores became ignored.
The parsing code for several Received: header formats has been updated.
Some BAYES_* scores for the network+bayes score set have been increased.
set_tag has been documented for the plugin API, and get_tag has been
added. There are additional bugfixes.

*LICENSE*

The Apache License 2.0, see:
http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.html