Pat and I had a good talk the other day about aliases, which I think was triggered from another conversation he had. Hula promised an Alias Agent from about day one, and it never arrived – and it is a big feature a lot of people want. “Group Objects” were misused to attempt to provide this function: I’m not totally sure the difference between a Group and an Alias, except that one relationship was potentially one-to-many.
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).
It’s been a little while since I blogged about anything 🙂
I have a number of Bongo patches on the go, but have only managed to commit one so far – the creation of secure certificates and crypto data that happens when you install Bongo should now be faster. For those with headless machines, hopefully much faster. We’ve also lost our dependency on gnutls’ certtool, which was a common installation problem (people often didn’t realise it was required).
So, recently a lot of stuff has been going on in my life – displacing the lower status stuff like hacking Bongo, painting the house, washing, shaving, that kind of thing. While I’ve tried to be online to cajole inspire others, that doesn’t really work – apparently my code talks better than I do. Ho hum.
More bad news – it’s looking increasingly likely that I’m not going to get to Ohio Lugfest in the States like I planned.
Many interesting IRC discussions today, so I thought I’d write some of it down. This helps settle things in my mind’s eye if nothing else 🙂
Netmail traditionally allowed people to cluster things in quite interesting/bizarre ways, and you were able to set things up so that there was no single point of failure: the configuration directory could be replicated, as could the store (I believe), and obviously you could set up redundant agents, all over many servers.
It has taken a while for the paperwork and stuff to work through, and I’m sure people who followed the discussion on our mailing lists will have almost entirely forgotten about this by now – but today’s big news is that Bongo is now officially a member of the Software Freedom Conservancy. This is strangely exciting – it’s another step forward for our project which re-affirms our commitment to what we’re trying to achieve.
This isn’t a great looking URL, but hopefully it will continue to work into the future: this is a Bongo group on Mugshot. At the moment, it’s just me – I wanted to try Mugshot out before I got into all the GNOME online desktop stuff that people are working on, but others are free to join in. The web swarm looks a particularly fun idea for sharing links we think are interesting.
Chris Lord has posted an essay entitled “Introducing Social Calendaring” which I think is an interesting read for Bongans. It took me a couple of reads of the paper to actually figure out what was being proposed, but that’s probably because I skimmed it first a few times with my own preconceived idea of what was being proposed.
I would love to see some of these ideas implemented in Bongo, although I don’t know to what extent some of it would work.
First post after being “away” – my server was down for a little while too :/ No matter, I wasn’t really in a position to blog anyway. Real life has interrupted for a bit, although I’ve managed a bit of hacking to distract myself.
So, we’ve had various troubles with IMAP. Somewhat hilariously, although I wrote a message to -devel about this, I did it from my trunk Bongo, which doesn’t actually send e-mail since the smtpc code was committed (which I think is a configuration issue over here rather than a bug of Pat’s).
I do love a good diagram, and I noticed that I have a number of Bongo-related diagrams stuck on my hard-drive. Most of them have seen action in a past blog post of mine, but my blog isn’t really a Bongo development resource, and the ones which haven’t yet been seen really ought to be a bit more widely available.
In general, though, programmers aren’t great at drawing things and worse, updating diagrams in drawing programs is often tedious and time-consuming.
