Re: General development issues

[Pawel Salek <pawsa theochem kth se>]

On 02/08/2004 12:57:58 PM, Darko Obradovic wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> this is mainly directed towards the maintainers, and please consider it
> a constructive suggestion and not as harsh criticism. :)

It is very much appreciated! :).

> 
> I'd really like to participate more on balsa-development, but it's
> somewhat hard to contribute imho:
> 
> A first idea was to look if there are some easy open bugs I could fix,
> a way to get somewhat familiar with the codebase. But the amount of
> bugs is quite large and a lot of them miss initial maintainer comments.

This IS a problem. There are two complementary ways to solve it:
- ask (I know it is sometimes slow).
- submit patches that contain comments! :)
 
> And then I'd like to point once more to my easy fix on #114041, which
> is plain frustrating for me I admit. :(

Sorry for this. I have just commited it to both branches.
 
> A second thing is the handling of patches. Right now the best way is to
> post them to the mailinglist instead of putting them into bugzilla.
> This is clearly related to the first issue, but wouldn't it be better
> to have patches in bugzilla and encourage contributors to use it that
> way? I could write three paragraphs presenting advantages, but it
> should be obvious I think.

I am very much for this - it makes tracing them much easier.
 
> A third point: future plans. Although I follow this list regularly, I
> was quite surprised (in a positive way!) when the 2.1-branch popped up
> with its new features. But I still don't know much about it, a roadmap
> or anything similar would be nice, you should have one for the
> maintainers anyways, no?

I do not think there is a formal roadmap. Main point with 2.1.x series is  
to test the new mailbox backend. My personal interest is in the IMAP part  
which should already now be much more bandwidth and memory friendly:

- only headers of displayed messages are downloaded.
- only displayed message parts are downloaded
- server side copy is used for message moving on the same server.
- view filtering: showing only eg. unanswered messages.

I used this new backend to access a mailbox with 5000 messages over a  
56kbps link. Opening takes 2-5s and the time is to large extent limited  
by the speed of the imap server.

- TLS support has been recently added in cvs.
- msg searching is missing at the moment.

Other mailbox types probably need more testing (maildir I think is ok but  
we keep finding problems with mbox).

Question of address management remains open, too. Support for mailing  
lists could be better. There were problems reported with mailbox  
renaming.

I think more information about development, releases etc. could be posted  
to balsa-list but it is not always easy to decide whether certain issue  
is interesting for a broader audience.

I am relatively busy person (a job, a kid etc) but if there is something  
I can do to help you to contribute to balsa, just ask.

Pawel