One can get quite used to life with setuptools.  While developing and deploying gibe, the install_requires setting in setup.py has come to be my friend, ensuring that everything I need is installed in the environment I'm working in.  But when investigating anti-spam options after the twenty or so spam messages overnight, I suddenly realised that there is a scary world without eggs.

Two options showed up in the Cheese Shop - spambayes and akismet Python API.

I'd used spambayes before, adding it to my vellum install to reduce spam.  So, I just popped it into install_requires and reran python setup.py develop to get it installed.  But there was no egg package available for setuptools.  It felt a lot like culture shock.  Anyway, I didn't give up immediately, and found out I could store the spam information in the RDBMS.  But then I decided to see what else there was.

I'd heard of akismet before - I saw it on the KnowledgeTree People blogs that use WordPress, but I went with moderation on those instead.  But since akismet keeps itself automatically up to date and I just felt like trying something different, I figured it was worth a shot.  Again, no egg file.  Thankfully, it is just a single file, though, and that means I can just bundle it, and things will work on a from-scratch Python environment (since I've been using virtual-python extensively lately).

Anyway, akismet has so far prevented 10 or so spam messages in the past few hours.  I know, because I've also integrated TurboMail, which now notifies me on all comments, whether they pass the spam test or not.  Besides a typo that prevents message delivery (who cares about that aspect of mail?), deployment with setuptools was flawless - just a simple easy_install of my updated gibe package.

Of course, now I need to figure out how I can send patches to the akismet and spambayes people to get them egged-up.