Category: bongo (Page 4 of 9)
When the new “MailCo” (as it was at the time) was announced, the first thing they did was poll people on what changes they should be looking to make to Thunderbird as kick-ass as possible – you can see from the initial launch blog post that integrated calendaring was item #1 on a list of new features.
Now, only one year on, the word is that calendaring won’t be integrated or bundled at all – in fact, it gets worse, because the calendar developers have also announced that a number of full-time developers have been lost.
This is based on Miguel’s desire for an IMAP interface to his Evolution mail, but isn’t really focussed on that particularly problem: rather, the more general problem of where “collaboration brains” belongs. One of the things which I think seems to be a bit worrying about free software mail clients is that there is this continuing move to smarter and smarter MUAs.
Miguel is actually asking for something which is much closer to what KDE are doing: the Akonadi project, as I understand it, is basically almost a full-blown local groupware/collaboration server.
Unlike Jono, whose experiences with Tbird 3 are worth a read, I’ve been a loyal Thunderbird user for a few years now – in fact, we’ve had it deployed at work relatively happily for a while now (I say relatively – the mail client is fine; lack of calendaring is a bit of an issue…). I also tried the Tbird 3 beta recently too, although I think I met with even less success.
You may have noticed that I’ve been very quiet on my blog over the past couple of months. This has been for a couple of reasons: primarily, I’ve been really busy, but also because I’ve been sort-of locked out of it while my laptop was out of commission. I was a Blosxom user, which is a lovely piece of software and very simple, and I chose it because it’s very easy to integrate into another site – however, that has now bitten the dust.
So, somewhat little advertised and somewhat exclusive, Linux Live Expo 2008 in London has been taking place. Friday was day two of three; for the first time it’s on a Saturday as well – and we’ll see how that goes tomorrow, I guess. But the first few days have been interesting.
Thursday started relatively slowly, although Bongo was sited next to the awesome OpenNMS guys – who travelled a lot further than I did to get there, and are exceedingly friendly.
We’re probably going to see 0.3 this week. I’m planning on releasing 0.2.94 today, at which point we’ll be back on SVN trunk, and then 0.3 sometime by the weekend. There are going to be a few known bugs not fixed, but it won’t be in terrible state by any means.
Want to see Bongo? I’ve just realised that there’s going to be a lot of Bongo in the community over the next few months.
It’s not often that I’m reading through some article online and come across someone using my own words in print (as it were), but that happened this morning!
It is a very strange feeling. I was reading Free, Open and Eating its Young – the premise of the article is that many free software communities have significant proportions of essentially anti-social contributors. Both Pat and I have blogged about this before – something that is important to me is that the climate of the Bongo community be extremely welcoming.
Well, I’m sorry to announce that my prediction was about right: we didn’t get into this year’s Summer of Code. From what I’ve seen, this year was extremely competitive, and many good projects didn’t get in.
It looks like only one project similar to us got in was OSAF/Chandler – they are a returning project, so that’s not a huge surprise. They have some nice looking Javascript ideas which I don’t think are very applicable to us, sadly, but who knows.
My best wishes to everyone in the Bongo community for the year ahead. I’m sorry not to have been around much over the holiday; our family lost our Grandmother four days ago, and as you might imagine things have been a bit upside down since. One minute I was committing a patch for new mail processing, the next I was in hospital (almost literally), and things have been a bit strange since.
By the time M3 will come out finally, it will have been five months since the last proper release. Time flies when you’re having fun! In all seriousness, that’s far too long, and we did bite off a bit more than we could easily chew. Ho hum.
The first test release for M3 is out there, though. I was going to call these release candidates, but I decided against it – there’s no way the first few will be released, so they’re not really RCs.
