There has been a little bit of Bongo hacking. In an ideal world, Pat would get with the programme and get himself a blog. People should keep bugging him on IRC to start blogging, and he could be writing some of this stuff instead of me 🙂

First up, the big connio-on-GNUTLS patch has landed. Pat has worked extremely hard on this, and while I’ve helped out on some setup stuff, it’s basically his work. This means that connio-using agents now use GNU TLS as their secure sockets and TLS implementation (pretty much, SMTP is the only renegade).

In practice, this won’t make a huge amount of difference to the end user, but it does mean we’re both GPL-compliant and secure again.

Like a machine, Pat is now looking at the SMTP agent to bring it into line. This is awesome work, and will hopefully mean that our SMTP implementation is much simpler than it was.

I’m still hopeful that our M1 release is more or less on schedule. To be fair, we’re not working directly towards it at this point: there are a few things which ought to be part of later releases which are being helped along, but there are three main features we really need for M1:

  1. We need antispam/antivirus working again. Mainly, there are some schema updates that we need to put in place first. I have 50% of my patch for this done, hopefully Pat can have a look after that’s in place (we’re working him really hard…)
  2. We need better logging. Anthony C. has taken a look at it, and I’m hoping we’ll have some mostly working logging for M1. Logging will be an on-going thing, but it’s great Anthony has picked this up.
  3. Luis posted to -dev bemoaning the state of our tools. I’ve written up a short proposal to how they ought to look, and I’ll be putting some patches forward in that direction. There would be fewer tools, but the split will be cleaner, and the tools more othogonal – it will hopefully make documentation a lot easier.

It’s a fair amount of work, but possibly sounds worse than it is. I’m hoping M1 will be a pretty useable release for developers, and I intend to migrate my Hula server to Bongo with it (technically, now we have GNU TLS, I could do that now). Later milestones will be a bit more straightforward.