colin@
colino.net

It’s been a long time since I didn’t post any Claws Mail news… (probably because it’s reaching maturity) so here are two screencasts that should please our Windows users :

Hope you’ll like it !

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.