Hope you’ll like it !

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).

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.

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!

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.

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 :-)

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…

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!

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 :-)

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.

Poll is here!

I hope you will like it!

Edit: By the way, most of the GUI code of that calendar comes from the excellent XFCE Orage clock and calendar application. Thanks to Juha!

You suck.

11 STATUS “[Gmail]/Sent Mail” (MESSAGES UIDNEXT UIDVALIDITY UNSEEN)
* STATUS [Gmail]/Sent Mail (MESSAGES 35 UIDNEXT 36 UIDVALIDITY 4 UNSEEN 1)

Please quote folder names containing spaces in your replies.

Anyway, we now had the possibility to remove this dependancy without removing the feature, as the GTK developers added a new API, GtkPrintOperation, to do printing. This is available with GTK+ 2.10 or greater.

We’ve waited a few monthes before implementing that, because their API is quite generic, and they didn’t provide a way for application developers to easily print a GtkTextBuffer — the GTK widget used texts spanning multiple lines. We thought it would be nice for a lot of application developers to be able to do that easily, and that it would spare them reimplementing the same thing again and again, in every app wanting print support.

I submitted the idea on their Bugzilla, but almost six monthes later with no activity at all on the bug, it’s quite clear that they don’t care.
So, Holger Berndt, one of our developers – author of the Notification plugin, the Perl plugin and the Synce plugin – decided to stop waiting, and implemented text printing of emails via GtkPrintOperation. His patch went into CVS, and the next day I added support for image printing, and a crappy preview. The next day again, Holger rewrote my preview code and turned it into a really nice preview. (Yes, one has to write the preview code, because the GTK developers decided it was better, by default, to do previews using “print-to-pdf-file and run Evince”, thus forcing a runtime dependancy on Evince.

Here’s the mandatory screenshot of the new preview:

So, I must say that even if GtkPrintOperation works fine, it feels half-done. The GTK developers did the bare minimum, in my opinion, to help application developers. We had to write 994 lines of code to implement that, and other people will write other 1000 lines of code to do the same thing…

• Notification icon – Trayicon since March 2003, plus the Notification plugin since March 2006
• Missing attachment warning – Since Attachwarner, November 2006
• “Magic Space Bar” – ! … Since the start of the project :)
• Sort by thread date – Since two monthes ;)
• Finding the timezone without asking – Since the start of the project
• Actually learn spams to SpamAssassin – Since February 2006

Evolution seems to get better !

GPL3, tags, some little new features (like LDAP write-support for attributes), speed optimisations, lots of improvements for the Maemo platforms, important fixes for Windows, and much more…

Try it :)

• 10 days ago I’ve been to Anne and Erwan’s wedding. Long trip, but great time, I was happy to share this moment with them and to meet half of #mandrivafr in the process :-)
• last week, holidays at Clo’s parents’ new place, where I helped her father with his move. Lots of real-world-hacking, lots of fun, and a good way to empty the mind…
• this week, Claws Mail 2.10.0 has been released, with lots of improvements. CVS already has new features that had been asked for a few times, tagging and sorting by thread date.
• this week-end, my little sister’s wedding with William :-)
• and next week, I should become the happy owner of a Nokia n800, thanks to Guido Rudolphi ! That will, hopefully, allow me to better test and improve Claws’ Maemo port…

Feature-wise, Claws Mail has, in my opinion, nothing to envy to Thunderbird. However, from this discussion, which took place both on Xubuntu’s forum and mailing-list, it appears that Claws Mail has some major problems:

• more crashers than Thunderbird (bugreports for Claws Mail, Thunderbird) in the 2.5.0-rc3 version. These are either fixed in later releases, or not pushed upstream.
• no GUI for Thunderbird import

But more importantly,

• Features that don’t exist in people’s mind (like “leave mail on server”)
• Not working as expected (whichever the expectations)
• Such a move would require to migrate 3 (three!) packages in the “Main” repository, and have a real maintainer instead of some person with zero knowledge of the package doing buggy uploads and not bothering to fix them when told.

So, it looks like Xubuntu will continue shipping Thunderbird as a default mail client, and by looking at the feedback this discussion brought, I’m happy with this choice. Trying to content people who don’t really want Claws Mail but a rewritten Thunderbird is a useless goal to pursue, whereas trying to content our user-base who do like Claws Mail’s “philosophy” is a much more enjoyable task.

• The standard layout:

• Three columns layout:

• Wide message list:

• Wide message:

]]> http://www.colino.net/wordpress/archives/2007/01/20/new-layouts-in-claws-cvs/feed/ 0 http://www.colino.net/wordpress/archives/2007/01/15/claws-mail-271/ http://www.colino.net/wordpress/archives/2007/01/15/claws-mail-271/#comments Mon, 15 Jan 2007 15:56:25 +0000 Colin http://www.colino.net/wordpress-1.5/archives/2007/01/15/claws-mail-271/ Claws Mail 2.7.1 has been unleashed!

1. Bristol is a nice place
2. I don’t know about english food, but english breakfast and english pizzas are fine
3. English Guinness is as fine as imported Guinness in France, and english cider is really different but nice too
4. Hoa is the worst geek among us, an award deserved by the fact he brought his laptop :-P
5. I apparently don’t have as much of a bad accent as I thought (yay!)
6. The UK security guys at the airport aren’t kidding, and they confiscated my toothpaste
7. It didn’t rain a single time, so I have to believe Paul when he says it doesn’t rain often in UK…

Here are the mandatory pictures:

I’m looking forward to the next meeting, where hopefully people (Andrej, Fabien for example) who couldn’t come this time would be able to join us!

I discovered Sylpheed then Sylpheed-Claws in December 2001. Started with Sylpheed version 0.6.6 (GTK+ 1.2.10; ), then after one month and two patches integrated in -Claws, switched to Sylpheed version 0.7.0claws (GTK+ 1.2.10; i686-pc-linux-gnu).

Didn’t look back since then…

What about you? (use an extended search in your sent folder, like:

header “X-Mailer” matchcase “sylpheed”

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 ? ;-)

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

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.

Here is the new preferences window:

And the result of trying to invite a busy person:

void g_mem_chunk_clean (GMemChunk *mem_chunk);

Frees any blocks in a GMemChunk which are no longer being used.

Let's try!

...

Hmm, it does nothing visible. Let's see...

From glib/gmem.c:

void        g_mem_chunk_clean       (GMemChunk *mem_chunk)  {}

Notice the empty function body.

_() for translation is slow

%f is slow

localtime() is slow – but there I didn’t find any workaround

thousands of fread()/fwrite() is slow, mmap is faster.

Feel free to add yourself! (State “user” or “developer”).

Just wait for 2.3.0…

O(n^2) algorithms are algorithms which execution time is proportional to the square of the number of elements to be processed. Meanwhile, O(N) algos are directly proportional to the number of elements, and O(1) is as fast given any number of elements. Every hacker would love to see only O(1) algorithms everywhere, but failing that, none of them like O(n^2). You can read more about this on Wikipedia.
Recently that’s what I’ve been doing on Sylpheed-Claws. Investigating why Claws can take huge amounts of time doing normal stuff has proven to be interesting work with a nice reward, just using tools like gprof, callgrind and gdb.

(results are at the end)

Symptom: Sylpheed-Claws takes too much time to open a folder
Fix: GtkCTree’s sorting functions uses gtk_ctree_link and gtk_ctree_unlink to build the tree, and these functions uselessly (in this case) use g_list_position on the rows list. Which means that building a 10k mail tree calls g_list_position 10000 times, which walks the whole list using a loop that runs for 1, then 2, then… then 10000 iterations. Reimplement gtk_ctree_insert_gnode and their called static functions.

Symptom: “Mark all read” and other mass flag changes takes too much time in current folder
Fix: Disconnect the GUI message update callback during flags unsetting, and update all at once instead of 10000 times.

Symptom: Copy and Move takes too much time
Fix: Use g_slist_prepend instead of g_slist_append to build the list of mails to copy/move, and save 10000 complete walks of the list.In addition to that, don’t take the pain of fetching and parsing the whole messages if this isn’t necessary. Finally, implement a progress bar for the psychological value of not facing a frozen app.
Symptom: Deleting or moving mails is slow
Fix: Before executing a move or deletion, we have to unthread the mail list, because removing a node removes its children even if they aren’t planned to be moved/deleted. Instead of unthreading everything recursively, just unthread child nodes of deleted/moved mails if they, themselves aren’t planned to be deleted/moved.

Symptom: Shift-selecting thousands of mails is slow
Fix: shift-selection is done by calling the select function N times with the ‘range’ mode, and add the rows using gtk_clist_select_row(). This function performs a g_list_nth() on the rows list to figure the node from the position, which makes it an O(n^2) algorithm. Replace that by getting the node once for the lower bound of the selection, and selecting the rest of the rows manually, just shifting in the rows list.

Symptom: Unselecting tons of mails is slow
Fix: freeze/thaw the list before unselecting everything, and avoid N repaints and check for repaints.

End result:
wwp has been kind enough to compare timings between 2.2.0 and latest CVS. He used a really big folder, 80000 messages, and his results are astonishing:

These results are almost embarrassing. But like all O(n^2) algorithms, operation on common sizes of folders,0-5000 mails, was fast enough. The bigger the folder, the bigger the gain!

But, strangely, nothing seems to happen on Sylpheed since more than one month. Hiroyuki left #sylpheed in early April, posted only one or two messages on his mailing-list,  and the last line in Sylpheed’s ChangeLog is:

2006-03-29

* version 2.2.4

Strange.

Concerning 2.2.0, we’ll have a few nice things to present you, especially an IMAP on steroids, a system to help sysadmins deploy Sylpheed-Claws on a large scale, and other goodies… With all of 2.1.2′s bugfixes, of course.

Meanwhile, our bugzilla’s open bug count is lower than ever, with 15 bugs open, 12 of them being enhancements requests… Nice !

You can download it there, and the release notes are here.
I feel unmotivated for the packages right now, though ;)

The long feature-freeze before 2.1.0 allowed some of us to gather a few kilobytes of patches, and we flushed all of this just after release. So, the next release will, very probably, be 2.2.0 as we already put in some new features: S/MIME support (although in an external plugin), a configuration template for the wizard that will please sysadmins trying to deploy Sylpheed-Claws in their organization, eye-candy in the MessageView messages, and a french translation for the manual, mentioned here yesterday. The manual is kept up-to-date this far, which is better than the previous thing we had!
Finally, I’ve put printed versions of the manual online at lulu.com, both the english and the french one. Lulu.com seems to be a good service, a bit like Cafepress, but for books. I hope people will like these manuals, because they’ll make me rich (one day. at $1.40 per copy, maybe I’ll be rich in 2020).

Les utilisateurs de CVS pourront le découvrir à leur prochaine mise à jour. Pour les autres, il est là.

Here it is: http://claws.sylpheed.org/timeline.php. Hover over the red stars for details.
Interesting how there are less downloads recently. I don’t think our user base is vanishing, so what could cause that?

• SourceForge changed their statistics
• More distros package Sylpheed-Claws
• People don’t upgrade each time now that we’re more stable
• People use snapshots (not counted there)
• Less different files released
• …?

Here’s a quick poll to find out what you, as our users, think!

So, it’s finally done after 2.5 monthes since last release! Paul and I have been investing a whole lot of our free time to make this happen, and the sensation post-release is kind of strange. I feel relieved, and tired as hell. Sylpheed-Claws sucked my energy!
Now is to hope that people won’t only answer to the announce mail to complain about this and that!

“A workaround is to save the message somewhere with the .eml extension,
so you can open it as Outlook Express message and print from there.”

I guess anyone can see the irony of this. Well, I thought that I wouldn’t want to have to answer this question, so I added images in the prints we do with libgnomeprint.

There are a few funny things to implement it, like the fact the x,y coordinates origin is in the lower-left corner like in maths, instead of the upper-left corner like we developers are used to. That, and libgnomeprint prints images, by default, to the 0,0-1,1 coordinates, making a nice 1 pixel image. So one has to rescale the thing explicitely. Still, I like this lib, even if its documentation mainly consists of digging through mailing-list posts to find out an answer provided to someone having the same problem before!

Now, there’s only one page of the manual left to write, the translations to get up to date, and we’ll be set! I’m impatient :)

Plus, it allows for little bonuses like being able to forward blog posts in two clicks, something you couldn’t do this well with any other solution.

Ubuntu users can try it out very easily after having added our ubuntu repository in their sources.list:
#echo deb http://claws.sylpheed.org/ubuntu/breezy ./ >> /etc/apt/sources.list
#apt-get install sylpheed-claws-rssyl-plugin

deb http://claws.sylpheed.org/ubuntu/breezy/ ./

There are packages for libetpan-0.39 (libetpan3) and sylpheed-claws-1.9.99 (sylpheed-claws-gtk2).
Enjoy!

What changed the most in this release could be the Addressbook, but people using IMAP might want to grab it as it fixes a few annoyances related to the new libetpan code (no, not deleting without expunging yet ;)).

I tried to send a news on linuxfr.org about this release, but it got rejected – maybe because of the conclusion, who knows. So I sent it as a journal.

The release notes
The thread on -users

<wwp>   any volunteer for a short bug chasing session?
<wwp>   I got a brand new one!
<claws> really?
<wwp>   and re-pro-duc-ti-ble
[...wwp describes his bug...]
<colin> I can't reproduce :-)
<claws> i can't reproduce it either
<colin> your backtraces show crashes inside gtk_clist_unselect_all and GTK_EVENTS_FLUSH()
<wwp>   hm
<colin> it looks like some compilation issue or something strange, too
<wwp>   hmmmm
<colin> you already had crashes in GTK_EVENTS_FLUSH(), if i remember well, that was when you had a strange binary
<wwp>   a strange binary..
<colin> yeah, remember, the one compiled with two differents gccs ;-)
<wwp>   let me check if gtk+ 2.6 has been compiled w/ the same compiler
<wwp>   shit you're right
<wwp>   ff........ckkkk
<claws> [slap]

Hi,

there’s been a big storm in Toulouse yesterday evening, and the roof of
our apartment’s “office” leaked a few litres of rain water, which fell
just on my iBook, during one or two hours, while we were away. Gory
details are on my blog for the curious…

After taking it apart and letting it dry for the whole day, I tried to
boot it back, and it’s dead. :-(

So I’m really in need of a new computer now, as my girlfriend’s PC is a
really outdated thing that works when it agrees to and compiles Claws
in about one hour; but I completely lack the money to buy it. The laptop
I plan on buying costs about 1200 euros.

If you users want to help me, it’d be really, really nice of you to
donate something to my paypal account (which is colin@colino.net)… It
would work with about 120 donations of 10 euros… Given the
“approximate subscribers’ count” stated by Sourceforge, that could work.

Many thanks,
Colin

So far, I’ve received about 60€. Thanks to the people who donated…