As releases go, 0.3 has been turning out pretty well. I meant to write about this sooner, but certainly for me after the release of 0.3.1 (which fixed some sadly quite obvious bugs), it’s been going great guns – on my Xen machine (~128Mb RAM, P3) it’s causing basically no load and has been running a couple of weeks without restart (which is rare, because any time I encounter a bug, I will try and fix it which necessitates a restart of Bongo). I have several thousand mails in my account over that time, and while there are a few oddities with mail parsing it’s basically fine.

Spreading the good Bongo word at recent conferences in Australia and the US has been good to see – Alex Hixon at Linuxconf.au, and Stu Gott at SCALE – our hero Stu is pictured here with (I think) Ken VanDine to his right and Kevin Harris to his left (apologies if I have this wrong; I’ve never met any of these guys). The green shirts are the uniform of the Foresight Linux project, which is an rPath project in the same vein as the Bongo VM Stu was demonstrating – Stu is also an rPath guy in disguise, and Bongo was very lucky and grateful that rPath lent him to us 🙂

The road to the next release is going to be an interesting one. On the server side, we have few functions left to put in place: aside from reworking bongo-manager, the main tasks will be continuing i18n integration, bugfixing, documenting, and less interesting stuff like that. At some point, we also need to give the code something of a security review also, but our “exposure” is relatively limited for the most part due to the modular design.

The web UI is really the difficult piece of work left, but in terms of scale it’s not the same kind of work that removing MDB was. It’s more familiar territory, and more developers will be involved – so hopefully it won’t be as fraught a process 🙂