Alex Hudson

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. The choice is coming down between “Ohio LugFest” and “New Kitchen”, and somewhat surprisingly my better half is demanding the improved culinary facilities. I’m still going to hit the States this September, though, I just won’t be able to stay quite as long – but I will try to make a point of seeing people while I’m over.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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. While I like some of the proposals in the paper, it is a shame that there was no kind of implementation work, because there are a couple of things I really think deserve more analysis (this might not make too much sense until you read Chris’ paper):

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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). So, d’oh to that. I’ll blog about this instead, then.

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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. So, I’ve committed some graphviz support into our build system which runs when you build the development documentation.

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So, Bongo didn’t make it into Google’s Summer of Code, but we did get some nice feedback from them. There’s good news and bad news 🙂

The good news is that they thought our application was very well done, and it was basically because they don’t have room for everyone that we didn’t get in: it sounds like we would have been acceptable, it just wasn’t our roll of the die. Unfortunate, but fair enough – I do suspect that Google have a theme or themes for each GSoC, and it might just be that we didn’t fit well this year.

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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).

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Last weekend I started looking at Hawkeye, prompted mostly by the need for people to be able to change the config for Bongo while we’re putting the new config system in place.

After a bit of hacking last night, it’s finally at the stage where it does something useful! You can run it under bongo-standalone (previously this wasn’t possible), you can log in as a user, and you can enable or disable agents from startup.

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