colin@
colino.net

Finally, we released Sylpheed-Claws 2.5.0, with nice new features like a Bogofilter plugin, quotes folding, per-account filtering on so on…

But bad luck, the evening after the release, we learn that the Bogofilter has a bug that duplicates messages. Given it’s annoying enough, Paul does 2.5.1, and releases that this morning…

But bad luck, hours after the release, we’re advised of a crash in partial downloading. Annoying enough to warrant a 2.5.2, again.

What’s interesting is that the bogofilter bug is in since the last release candidate, got reported once, and a patch I did made us think it was fixed – whereas it was just that the reporter did not reopen the preferences (which is what triggered the bug). The partial downloading crasher, too, was in since two release candidates, and no-one reported it. It didn’t even break the feature for me. So, I’m wondering if our RC testers don’t get a bit lazy about reporting bugs, or are they just lucky ?

On a more positive note, one of Sylpheed-Claws’ shames is gone and we can now auto-complete groups.

(This is in CVS only, heh… I certainly don’t want to release .3 .4 and .5 now ? ;-)

Poor Cybe R. Wizard seems to be annoyed at the fact that Sylpheed-Claws doesn’t always deliver its promises.

Sorry! That’s a FIXME… We didn’t implement that function yet, as much as we want to ;-)

My free/busy work on the vCalendar plugin was motivated by the fact the manager at work wanted to be able to get engineers’ availability more easily on his Outlook. As two of them used Sylpheed-Claws already, a few others Evolution or Kontact, and the rest Thunderbird, I worked a bit on the plugin to make it work better in this regard. I’ve declared Thunderbird unsupported at work, because Sunbird or whatever it is named is completely not ready nor usable.

After that, Thunderbird users at work had to migrate to either to Evo, Kontact or Sylpheed-Claws, and they all chose Sylpheed-Claws — I wonder why! So I assisted them in the migration process, and have been able to find out some bugs in vCalendar, which I fixed today. Thanks to Aleksandar Urosevic for his tbird2syl.py script!
In the process I added a better free/busy checking when creating a meeting, although with no groovy gradients, and made the whole stuff much more usable.

Here’s how it looks like to create a meeting with latest CVS, with one people busy, one available and another with no info published. When you hover over the status icons, you get suggestions for other possible meetings times, if possible in the next or previous 6 hours.

Latest CVS snapshot of the vCalendar plugin now has support for free/busy information publishing and retrieving. This means that Sylpheed-Claws will be completely corporate-compatible now!

Here is the new preferences window:

And the result of trying to invite a busy person: