The Bongo Bugle - Issue3 - 14June 2007
The Bongo Bugle, the indirect straight line for all things Bongo bound :-)
The Bongo Project
1. Welcome to the Bugle
2. News from the Bongoverse
3. Tips and tricks
4. IRC and Mailing list discussions
5. Bookmarks
6. You're Nicked
7. Next Issue
--
1. Welcome to the Bugle
The Bongo Bugle is a fluid publication and things will change (hopefully for
the better) as feedback is received from you, the benevolent reader. The aim of
this delightful publication is to provide an insight into all that is related
to the Bongo Project , hopefully mixing the serious with the humorous - granted
the humour may be lost in some spots. I will endeavour to get some sort of
release schedule, but for now it is going to be very much it's released when
it's ready :-)
To assist the development of this publication, comments are appreciated. You
have a few options, comment against this article, mail into the Bongo Users
mailing list (see the Bookmarks section for details), voice your comment on IRC
(again see the Bookmarks section for details) or e-Mail. .
--
2. News from the Bongoverse
So what is new in the Bongoverse, if you don't know what a "Bongoverse" is have
a look at our first issue :-).
• We hit our second milestone release M2 (only slightly delayed).
• Current version in SVN is r113
• A new test implementation of Bongo's store is being created initially
called “Ninja” by Alex Hixon.
• Bongo hits Lug Radio Live on July 7th and 8th, with a BoF.
• The Bongo community still appears to be growing a few more old hands from
Hula have joined in on the Mailing Lists and IRC.
• Bongo packages for Debian Etch and Ubuntu Feisty have been released, many
thanks to Jonny Lamb.
• The roadmap has been updated with revised dates.
• Bongo has been invited to the Software Freedom Conservancy, an
organisation that takes care of legal, assets and donations.
• The first batch of polo shirts have been received, many thanks to Jonny
Lamb for organising this. Those of you that have ordered them, please contact
Andy Wafaa.
• Theron Conrey was kind enough to offer his services and facilities to
help out with testing the packages that have been built, apart from a couple of
minor issues all went well – many thanks Theron.
• We now have a map for users and developers to place them selves on (see
the Bookmarks section), please place yourself on there that way we can see how
our plans for world domination are going :-P.
--
3. Tips and Tricks
This issue's tip is all about one of the functions available in Bongo, and
helps you get any mail that appears to have built up in the queue and not get
delivered to the respective mailboxes:
bongo-queuetool flush
This flushes the mail queue in the same way that postqueue -f or sendmail -q
does. You may need a bit of patience at times to get all the mail out.
--
4. IRC, Forum and Mailing list discussions
• Discussions have been going on about synchronising with handheld devices
(mobile phones/PDAs etc), and the possibility of using an opensync style
conduit.
• In addition to opensync, discussions about SyncML have also been going
on, Matt Bassett has volunteered to investigate this and try and hack a new
SyncML agent of sorts.
• Issues with SQLite 3.3.17 and above were highlighted, and possible
solutions suggested.
• M3's release plan has been discussed, this will be the first release
where we actively want users (non-developers) to give it a go.
• Plans on advertising have been bounded about.
• Work is under way to try and clear some of the cruft, and use the
distro's own libraries rather than supplying our own.
• The CLucene search mechanism bit a few people, naughty Clucene.
• Dragonfly tweaks have been discussed, primarily having the option to have
“Hackergotchi” style images of contacts show up in conversations.
• Trademarks have been brought up and whether there is any infringment from
Bongo (there isn't by the way)
• There appear to be some issues with Bongo's SMTP crashing :-(Thankfully
all in IRC are trying to help :-)
--
5. Bookmarks
As the title may suggest, this section is all about the links. We will
hopefully have one of the most up to date collections of Bongo associated links
available. Don't forget that on any of the three official sites
(homepage/forum/planet you can easily browse to another official site from the
top left):
• Bongo homepage and wiki
• Planet Bongo - An aggregation of Bongo contributors' blogs
• Bongo Forums
• Developer Section - One for all you hackers out there
• Bug Tracker
• Bongo's place on GNA!
• Mailing list - bongo-commits - Commits on the Bongo Project repositories.
No direct posts allowed.
• Mailing list - bongo-devel - Discuss development of the Bongo system
• Mailing list - bongo-users - General user support and chat
• #bongo - The IRC channel on irc.oftc.net
• IRC Logs - A great way of following the discussions that have been going
on
• Bongo Client Compatability List
• Map of Bongo Users & Developers
• Bongo Screenshot gallery
--
6. You're Nicked
In this section we interrogate one of Bongo's Contributors, this issue the
suspect is one of Bongo's founding hackers:
BB: Your name please?
PF: Patrick Felt
BB: Your web presence please?
PF: http://www.feltonline.com
BB: If people would like to hurl abuse at you on IRC, what are you known as?
PF: fatpelt ( a simple grade-school game of swapping the first letter of the
first name and the first letter of the last name )
BB: Where does one hail from?
PF: Utah, USA
BB: Do you use Linux, if so what is your distribution of preference?:
PF: Recently I installed Ubuntu on my laptop, however my distro of choice would
be Gentoo. Compiling takes a fair bit at times, but the emerge/portage system
is the best packaging experience I've had.
BB: How long have you been working on Bongo?
PF: I was first introduced to the Bongo codebase in about 1999 when I hired on
at Novell doing install stuff for the new ZenWorks imaging system. It's a long
story as to why our group, which was the Novell Internet Messaging System group
was doing ZEN, but we were. I worked on NIMS 2.1-2.65 and ran 2.65 at home from
1999 till about Hula r400 or so. I got back into it as soon as the Hula project
went live. I coded the first version of the mdb-ldap driver which was a
monster.
BB: So you obviously hacked on Hula, was this also how you have such a good
relationship with some of the Novell and Messaging Architects guys?
PF: As I mentioned I worked with the team in 1999 as an Intern. Rodney and
Micah (both now with MA) were on the team then, however I got to know David
Smith back then too though he was on a different team. I try to go to lunch
with them at least once a week for several reasons. 1) friendship 2) the Novell
cafeteria has the best "steak and everything" sandwich anywhere 3) I like to
chat mail with them :-)
BB: The sandwich sounds good. Are you working on any particular feature?
PF: Mostly right now I'm buried in SMTP and the Queue agent. I'm really a back
end guy. My right brain is terribly small, so I stay clear of the pretty stuff
like DF and HE. I'm trying to find ways to improve upon the way SMTP works and
performance improvements both there and in the queue.
BB: Is there a feature that you like in particular?
PF: Everything I've done ;-)Seriously though, I'm excited for the scalability.
I don't get much mail at home, however for work I manage a
FOSS based mail stack with nearly 10,000 mailboxes. I don't like it that much
in terms of scalability or configurability. I'd love to get onto Bongo. I also
like the ability (partially hidden atm) to be able to run agents across
multiple hosts allowing for quick scaling.
BB: What feature do you want to see apart from scalability?
PF: I'm also thinking of adding milter support to SMTP. Another idea or two
would be to separate the SMTP agent into two separate agents, moving
antispam/antivirus into some other location so we can either use it as an agent
or include it in the smtp agent for delivery time rejection of mail. I'd also
like the aforementioned speed improvements in the queue, and replication of
configuration data between stores.
BB: You've mentioned previously that you're pretty proud of the Bongo
community, is there any aspect you would like to change and what would you like
to see from the community?
PF: I think the only thing I'd like to change in the community is its size. I
hope that as we get more people we will be able to keep the atmosphere, but i
really am amazed at how well we do at welcoming people. I think that is one of
our strongest attributes.
BB: Who do you see as Bongo's competitors and how can we be better than them?
PF: That is a hard question for me actually. It depends on what facet you are
looking at. For the backend we have several. There are parts that compare to
other systems, but the number of systems that match fully to us is very small.
For example, we compare in part to Exim, Courier, Postfix, Sendmail, but those
systems don't have anything quite like DF/HE (Dragonfly the User web frontend
and Hawkeye the Admin web frontend). We compare somewhat to
SquirrelMail/NutsMail however they don't have a backend. Then there are the
systems such as Zimbra. I think we stomp them just because we don't use Tomcat
and we are quite fast. I think that continuing on the DF/HE move and adding
improvements there (calendaring, syncing etc) and adding features to the
backend to make us better compete with the likes of Exim et al will make us a
killer mail app.
BB: Anything else you would like to say to all the readers?
PF: Someday I'll get to meet up with you all, since the majority of you are in
Europe :-)I often get jealous that you all are so close and can get to
conferences and such.
Many thanks to Pat for his time.
--
7. Next Issue
This is the bit that comes down to you, tell us what you want. As it stands now
the intention is for nothing. Oh sorry do you want more? You should really see
a shrink, but ok; the next fine instalment of the Bongo Bugle will most likely
contain much of the same as this issue (maybe). More Bongoverse, more tips and
tricks, more interviews and hopefully more developers and users :-)
Thanks for your time patience and insanity, this has been a party political
broadcast on behalf of the Bongo Project . Downloadable copies can be obtained
in odt or pdf formats, please "right click" and select "save as".
--
Andrew Wafaa
Tel: +44 (0)7974 074546
e-Mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
_______________________________________________
Bongo-users mailing list
[email protected]
https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/bongo-users
