Alex Hudson

A while ago, I wrote some thoughts on Thunderbird in the aftermath of the announcement of the new MailCo and the resignation from Mozilla of two key developers. I was disappointed at the time, but looking back at my post, I don’t think it was particularly negative – if anything, I was pointing out how vital I still thought (and think) it is that Tbird be a successful project.

Having exchanged pleasantaries with David Ascher over the past couple of days, and read what he has to say about Tbird, I’m much less disappointed and much more hopeful. Tbird is important to Bongo for a variety of reasons, particularly having a good standards-compliant client for Windows users is crucial. Over time, I’d like to see Tbird become an exemplar client: it should be possible to have mail, events and contacts all integrated, and take full advantage of server-side functionality so that the sum of bongo + tbird is greater than the sum of the parts. Implementing server/client standards, like mail, is a chicken and egg problem. Having both the chicken and the egg drive each other forward (is that stretching the metaphor too far ? 🙂 can only be a good thing.

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I sent this link around the Bongo people on Mugshot, and on IRC, but here it is again for the benefit of people watching our planet: the future of Thunderbird seems to be a bit cloudy, Mozilla Corp. seem to have realised that it doesn’t quite fit it.

Primarily, this disappoints me, because I always saw Tbird as a natural fit to the Bongo Project. We’re developing a kick-ass webmail, and that will appeal to a lot of people, but there are other people – like me – who simply don’t use webmail. The business I run uses Thunderbird, and (coupled with Lightning) we’re pretty happy with it, even though there are a lot of rough edges for a business. I had hopes for a Bongo add-on to Tbird which would automatically set it up for you, with your calendars and contacts and stuff, and work well with your server-side config. Ideally, you’d be able to edit your mail filing rules, get the server to mark mail as spam, and setup vacation response.

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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 🙂

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I was hoping we’d have an initial attempt at M3 by now – we’re so close, honestly, but just not quite there yet. Annoying, even for me, but good things come to those who wait.

I’m acutely aware of one problem: our up-front decision with this project was to lay out a road to 1.0 that we thought was achievable, and basically just do it in milestone steps. Between M2 and M3, this hasn’t really worked out in the way I would have wanted. From the outside, I assume that it looks like the project has slowed down a bit.

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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?

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So, someone asked me the first good question about the vision for Bongo. To paraphrase, why am I against using the word groupware?

The easy historical answer is that it was almost the rallying call for Hula, and the groupware bad essay by jwz expressed this quite neatly in some ways. But that’s not a very good ‘why’ answer.

For me, the difference is probably quite slight in some respects, but it comes down to who we design features for. Do we design them for people, or do we design them for groups / teams / organisations? In my opinion, the answer has to be that you design for individual people.

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I wasn’t going to mention Hula particularly, but since the recent announcement it seems the right time. I’ve said basically the same thing on bongo-devel too:

• I’m pleased to see Novell have finally got something sorted out. I think we were left in the dark too long, and it was supposed to be an open source community.
• I’m glad to see Messaging Architects look enthused about Hula, and I will watch where they take it with interest.
• Bongo is still relevant. While I hope MA will run Hula like a true free software project, I don’t think Novell did, and it will be hard to turn that around. The Novell CA which put a few hackers off is still there. I’m hoping that we can work with MA in the future, we’ll just have to see how thing go.

At the end of the day, we started Bongo because we didn’t want to be reliant on the success (or not) of Hula. I think the inverse is true: the success of Hula doesn’t depend on what happens with Bongo. Either or both projects can achieve that success, and that’s what we really care about.

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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.

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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.

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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). I’d love to hear from anyone who has any problems with the new setup.

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