colin@
colino.net

Since a few years, our website, www.claws-mail.org, has been hosted by the nice people of Develog. Our CVS and mailing-lists were hosted on dotsrc.org, another bunch of nice guys offering hosting to free software projects since years.

However, they’re starting to lack time and manpower to continue providing hosting — I guess they’re, like us, getting older and more and more busy with real life — and are in the process of shutting down hosting.

I’ve grabbed our multiple-year CVS history, and mailing-lists archives and subscribers lists from them, and after asking Yann, I’ve moved them on the same host as www.claws-mail.org.I’ve updated our CVS and Community pages to reflect the changes.

It should provide us with good quality hosting, and it also has the benefit of being free (as in beer) — thanks Yann ! Another advantage is that as Yann trusts me, I have a fair amount of control over the server, if needed.

It has only one drawback, as this server is Yann’s, and his job isn’t to provide free hosting to free software projects, that’ll add a bit of admin-load on my free time. But, mostly, it works and I won’t have a lot to do. I can also do-outsource backups, which makes me feel safer (for a little bit of time, I thought Dotsrc would leave us with no CVS history, which was a freaky thought).

Finally, I’ll be able to migrate us to Subversion or some other version-control software, if and when we agree on something, and I can get some time to do the migration and related (related is what takes some time, I’d have to change our tracker for something like Trac, change my buildbot scripts, fix the commit mail scripts, and other things I probably forget).

I’ve had Claws-Mail added to Coverity’s scanner. The first result is : 0.30 report per 1000 lines of code. This is quite good I think, although these metrics aren’t a holy graal and static checking doesn’t catch everything.

There are 91 reports to look at, which I’ll start doing tomorrow evening – I’ll be alone at home this week, will use this time to bugfix!

Update: 6 reports remain, which are false positives. The fixed problems were mainly resource leaks (either fds or memory allocations), missing NULL checks when dereferencing pointers — most of them harmless but good to have fixed anyway, and uninitialized variables. No horrible bug was found by Coverity’s scanner, just corner cases. I’ve also ran some external plugins through it, and most of them are rather clean, with the exception of VCalendar, where most reports are due to libical which uses an apparently confusing memory allocation/free scheme.

Paul released 3.6.0 on last Friday, with a bit of pain which could have been avoided by two things: checked translations with msgfmt -c (which translators seem to often forget), and a better Sourceforge.net interface (which is a long-standing problem).

Then I’ve started to package it and then, the problems started:

• It crashed hard on Maemo – due to the new menu code. Fixed.
• I forgot to include the new Enchant dependancy in Ubuntu packages, breaking the spellchecker. Rebuilt, fixed. Fixed?
• The MIME parts icons were invisible on Maemo, for strange Gtk widget requisitions problems. It had always worked everywhere… Fixed, anyway.
• Multiple, strange crashes happened to Ubuntu users in extra plugins – due to my rebuild of the core with spellchecker support, which changed structures sizes, and I didn’t rebuild extra plugins, making plugins look in the wrong place for preferences, for example. Fixed.
• Crashes in vCalendar, due to a “leak fix” I did which in reality introduced a double-free. Fixed. (The first one to say that gotos are evil gets my foot to the bottom – gotos aren’t evil. Programmer’s stupidity is).
• SSL handshakes failures with some IMAP servers using my Ubuntu packages. A bug I introduced in libetpan when built against GnuTLS. Fixed in libetpan, and fixed in Claws.

It now seems to be under control, but most of these problems are in the source of libetpan 0.56, Claws Mail 3.6.0 and vCalendar 2.0.1, which means that if my packages work, packages made by other people, not aware of these issues, contain this issue. So, we plan to release a 3.6.1 at the end of the week if Paul can, and Hoa plans to release libetpan 0.57, so that our lives and users’ lives are easier during the next development cycle.

And all of these problems are my own fault, which makes it very frustrating. I hate releasing crap, and all of these, apart the invisible-icon-on-Maemo bug, could have been avoided if I double-checked stuff a bit better at the time I did it.

Oh, and Mandriva packages have not been done, because their SVN is frozen for the 2009.0 release. I had been annoyed by that at first, but in the end, maybe it’s a good thing I didn’t push that into their release!

It’s been a while since the last post… So, Clo is still more pregnant than ever, and the due date is in less than two weeks now. I could become a father in the next hours!

Waiting for this to happen, and given that everything’s ready towards the baby’s arrival, I tried to help make Claws Mail 3.6.0 a really good release.

After two release candidates, most of the bugs seem ironed out; I’ve prepared the most I could to be able to quickly build packages after the release, as I usually do Mandriva, Maemo and Ubuntu packages, it can take quite a bit of time and that’s if nothing fails. I often experience Murphy’s law when trying to build packages.

As if these three distribution packages weren’t enough, I started looking at the Windows issues that the Gpg4win team faced. I was tired of having a crappy broken build of 3.0.0-rc2 with no SSL and no IMAP. So the good news is that currently, the SVN version of Ggp4win builds Claws Mail 3.5.0cvs138, with the following notable changes:

• IMAP
• SSL
• NNTP
• No more leaking 50 megs when changing folders
• Various buglet fixes (crashers, annoyances)
• Better integration to the windows theme
• Notification plugin
• RSSyl plugin
• VCalendar plugin
• GtkHTML2 Viewer plugin

It’s most probably not bug free, but at least it starts to have a large enough subset of Claws’ feature not to be ashamed of it.

Users of the old windows versions are encouraged to start from scratch (by removing Claws-Mail and mailboxes from %APPDATA%).

You can get the (now current) installer here: gpg4win-light-1.9.8-svn929.exe.

Il y a quelques jours, Unixgarden a publié sur son site un ancien article que j’avais écrit pour Linux Pratique, qui visait à présenter Sylpheed-Claws — qui ne s’appelait pas encore Claws Mail :-)

Voici l’article. Ça me fait de vieux souvenirs, je l’ai écrit entre la version 1.9.14 et 1.9.15, c’est à dire début octobre 2005. Le canal IRC était #sylpheed, sur IRCNet. On avait encore le plugin ClamAV, pas encore de plugin PDF re-disparu depuis, et les plugins TNEF Parser, SpamReport, S/MIME, RSSyl, GtkHtmlViewer, AttRemover, AttachWarner et Archiver n’existaient pas encore. On a fait du chemin :-)

It’s been a long time since I last blogged! I’ve been really busy with real life…

As you may know, dear reader, my wife (Clo) is pregnant and we’ll have a baby soon (in about 50 days !), so we’ve been preparing stuff in advance. Over the last monthes, we’ve redone the floor in the future baby’s room, created cupboards, painted things, we’ve boughtfurniture , we’ve moved our “office” in the living room, we’ve built a few things, we spent time in baby stores to make lists, see what we needed, buy a few things, etc.

Now we’re almost ready, so we’re waiting :-)

Also, there’s been a whole lot of people at home to visit us – both of my sisters, Clo’s brother, my mother, Clo’s parents, … Very nice! If only we knew we’d just have to make babies to bring them over! ;-p

Yes, I’ve been linking to Clo’s blog everywhere. Not my fault if she blogs more than me!

On the Claws Mail front, I’ve put some days off to use and, following the announce of the GTK team of GTK+3, I’ve removed every fucking deprecated line in our source code and rewrote code that worked; just because the GTK+ guys can’t be bothered with keeping deprecated code around, I’ve rewritten about 10.000 lines, I think. Thanks, dudes. We’ve also been able to fix a good number of bugs, and added support for client SSL certificates.

Maybe we’ll release soon…

“These developers seem to have their priorities in the right place.”

Jonathan Corbet of LWN published last week a review of Claws Mail. I’m quite happy about what he says, his review is quite positive and, as I like his work a lot, I’m pleased!

…rocks.

A user told us on the mailing list that he got a crash. It was SIGXFSZ, File size limit exceeded… Due to the protocol log file growing too much, probably 2 or 4 gigabytes…

The end of his log reads:

IMAP4< 8918737 OK Status completed.

The number at the left is the transaction id of the IMAP protocol, incremented by 1 on every command. That means almost 9 millions commands :-) Our user started Claws Mail on March 10, it crashed on April 17 only due to the log file.

Comforting to read that :-)

A coworker of mine noticed after cleaning up his IMAP folders, that he managed to fill INBOX.Trash with 313.924 mails, and Thunderbird failed utterly at managing that folder.

He then tried to open it with Claws Mail, which succeeded at the second attempt (a wifi disconnect ruining it at 70% the first time – and the 200 MBs of downloaded data got leaked in libetpan, bad).

The second time, the folder opened:

As you can see, the folder is big. We discovered an overflow in the size handling in the process: the mailbox was bigger than 1GB… Claws consumed 670MB of memory with that folder open, but it handled it.

When trying to empty it, we noticed that setting \Deleted flags was really slow, and the server process was using 99.9% CPU on the server. We ended up destroying the mbox on the server.

Which one do you prefer, and should be the default view for vCalendar?

Poll is here!