Alex Hudson's Blog
Thu, 21 Feb 2008
So, this is the extra task I alluded to in my last blog post, but don't let that put you off!
I'd love to hear from people about how they use Bongo now, and how they want to use Bongo in the future. Especially, I'd like to hear from people who are watching this project but not participating more directly. So, to that end, I've kicked off a discussion on the forum: Where do you (want to) use Bongo?
There is no burning reason behind this, but I'd really like to have an idea of where people see the software being useful, and in what scenarios they'd think about deploying it. It's fine to say "I'm waiting for (X crucial feature)", and it's not likely to make me work on that crucial feature because they're different for everyone ;), but I'd really like to hear what kind of organisation you're in, or what tasks you'd want to use Bongo for, or why you're not happy with your current system.
Everyone can contribute to the forums, so no excuses! There are no right or wrong answers, and I imagine everyone will have a different reason. I've posted mine, so please post yours :)
posted at: 17:23 | path: /bongo/feedback | permanent link to this entry
From Friday until late Monday night, I will be on retreat and entirely away from the internet. No, Bongo hasn't scared me off, I will be back :) So, I figure that I'm going to try again my "pretty please" act to get people to look at some bugs: it worked great last time I tried it, and I can't remember why I didn't try again. Of course, many people won't feel competent enough to look at some of these bugs, so there's an extra-credit task at the end of this coming up in a further blog post :)
- Thunderbird and IMAP: we have a bug which a number of people have seen, where large amounts of e-mail can't be fetched even though Bongo appears to be running correctly. I've tried tracing what happens and can't figure it out; my guess is that the connection is being dropped early or something similar. Pat said turning off anti-spam checking on incoming e-mail seemed to solve/mitigate the problem for him; does anyone else have any workarounds they know of? Does someone want to go through doing some testing with various clients and see if they all trigger this bug? You'd need to setup a new account, fill it with mail somehow with the imap client offline, and then see if it happens. I think around 300 mails is enough to trigger it - at least, it does here. Does it happen if you remove the IMAP account on the client and re-create it? Anyone solving this bug will win a couple of beers at least.
- Bug #10790 is about building against an external libical. Anyone familiar with the build system want to have a go at this? Shouldn't be too hard :)
- Similarly, it'd be great if someone looked at the CLucene build test. At the moment, if you're on x86_64, Bongo won't let you compile against a system CLucene library because most of them are too broken for us to use. However, not all of them are. A better compile-time check would be to compile a small test program and see if CL_MAX_DIR is defined to be greater than twice CL_MAX_PATH - if so, we should fail then and only then.
- I'd love someone to do a review of the various ISPs around - even just in one country, but preferably many - and look at what their SMTP requirements are. Some places do various things, like:
- preventing any kind of outgoing SMTP at all (Wanadoo/Orange; force people to use a mail relay);
- have an SMTP relay which requires SMTP AUTH (many);
- have an SMTP relay which requires TLS (?any);
- rewrite outgoing mail messages (e.g., Sky, altering From: to a Sky.com address - true evil).
It would be great to hear if other ISPs have discovered/implemented other kinds of SMTP evil. Bongo - as it stands - won't work in any of the above scenarios (1. requires manual config change, 2. I don't think we can do, 3. we have buggy code for which is disabled, 4. we can't solve anyway). I'd really like to know what features we need to implement in Bongo for it to be usable for a wide range of ISP services.
I'll likely drop back in on Monday night, but I won't otherwise have internet from tomorrow onwards, so don't expect me to be around (except that my irc client will probably stay logged in, but away). See you all then!
posted at: 17:19 | path: /bongo/community | permanent link to this entry