Tag Archives: bounties

Geary

Geary bounties galore

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A number of Geary bounties have popped up in recent weeks that our users may want to know about.  Bounties represent reward money for coder(s) who successfully land their improvements in the program.  (Yorba created a bounty a few months back for Geary, you can read about it here.)  Some of the new Geary bounties include:

“Add option to sort folder into read and unread” – There’s a number of ways to approach this; I would be happy to simply have a switch or toggle button that filtered read conversations from the list, leaving only unread to peruse.

“Notify of new messages at startup” – This is a long-standing feature request and it would be great to get this landed in Geary.  There’s a number of fancy ways this could be achieved, but I think the easiest way to approach this would be for Geary to be launched at login time with a magic command-line option that hides the main window.  As new messages come in, notifications are displayed.  If the user clicks on the Geary icon or the notification bubble, the hidden window is displayed.  The added complication here is that closing the window should merely hide it, while the Quit option would, in fact, cause Geary to exit.

“Ubuntu online accounts integration” – The basic thrust of this problem is to fetch account information from UOA and start pulling down mail with no user interaction (other than starting Geary, of course).

With all bounties, please be sure to read over the linked Bugzilla ticket and understand all the in’s and out’s of the task.  Tickets are also the best place to ask questions for the Geary team.  We’re here to help!

Some of these bounties are courtesy our good friends at elementary while some have been initiated by independent users who simply would like to see Geary improved.  Follow the above links to see how much money is up for grabs on each.

If you see a feature you really, really want to see added to Geary, consider how much it’s worth to you and pledge that amount.  High dollar values encourage attention from developers and gets traction and movement.  And if one of the above doesn’t tickle your fancy, there’s a whole host of other outstanding bugs that are listed but have no money behind them; pledge and get them started!

As always, Yorba developers will not collect bounties, but we certainly encourage everyone out there to think about (and act upon!) how they can contribute toward improvements.

Announcements, Geary

Geary 0.4.2 backport for Precise 12.04 / Luna now available

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geary-yorbaLast month I announced Yorba was sponsoring a $500 bounty to backport Geary 0.4 to Precise Pangolin 12.04 and elementary’s Luna.  I’m pleased to announce two new developments toward that goal.

First, since then six forward-thinking people added another $100 to the bounty, making the total pot $600.  Thank you!  This was the part of the experiment I was most interested in.  Backporting Geary to 12.04 was a highly-requested task, and I wondered if the people who wanted it would be willing to contribute a little money toward that goal.  At least some people did think it worthwhile enough, and collectively they added 20% to Yorba’s initial offer.

Second, I’m pleased to announce that the goal has been reached.  Tom Beckmann put in a lot of hours and considerable blood, sweat, and tears to port Geary back to 12.04, but he did it and so he claims the bounty.  I’ve run his version of Geary on both Precise and elementary Luna and am quite impressed.  It uses our new symbolic icon layout, it’s integrated with Precise’s message indicator, and offers every feature in Geary 0.4, including full-text search and the stability improvements we added to 0.4.1.  Best of all, he packaged it up on a Launchpad PPA, meaning it’s a snap to install.

If you’re running Precise Pangolin 12.04 or elementary Luna and you’d like to upgrade your version of Geary, I recommend the following directions.  Open a terminal window and type the following:

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:tombeckmann/geary
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install geary

If you’re already running Geary 0.3.1, this new version will update your old database and you’ll be good to go.

A few notes about this release:

  • This is not an official Yorba release of Geary.  Please note the version number in the About box (Geary 0.4.2+backport).
  • Yorba will not be proactively fixing bugs or adding features to this backport.  If there’s sufficient interest in keeping the backport alive, we’re hoping the community will work together to maintain and update it.
  • If you encounter a bug with the backport, your best bet is to use the Geary mailing list to report it.  Please indicate in your email that you’re using the backport.  There’s no official bug tracking system for this backport at this time.

(One further note: due to some technical issues, the original Bountysource.com page was moved here.  Other than the URL, all details have remained the same.)

Congratulations Tom, and thanks!

Announcements, Geary

Would you like to see Geary 0.4 available on Ubuntu 12.04 / elementary Luna?

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geary-yorbaWe’ve received a lot of complaints from users that Geary 0.4 isn’t available for Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise Pangolin) and elementary Luna.  It wasn’t an arbitrary decision on our part.  As we developed Geary 0.4, we learned that more and more components that Geary relied on were changing or simply unavailable in 12.04/Luna.  There’s a tangible engineering cost to maintaining backward compatibility.  At some point this summer we realized it was too much work to maintain support for 12.04/Luna as well as newer versions of Ubuntu, Fedora, and all the other distros out there.

But Ubuntu 12.04 and elementary Luna (which is based off of 12.04) has a steady fan base who would really like to run Geary 0.4.  What to do?

We have limited resources, but we don’t want to leave users out in the cold.  We believe this is a problem both Yorba and the community can solve.  So we’ve created a bounty for the problem — if someone out there (or a group of people) solves this problem for us (and therefore everyone else!), they’re rewarded with cold, hard cash.  It’s that simple.

If you’re interested, read on:

There’s two pages you should read: the issue ticket at Yorba’s project server (which details the problem and the stipulations for collecting the bounty) as well as the bounty page at Bountysource.com (where the promised funds are listed).

If you want to see Geary 0.4 work on 12.04/Luna, you can help.  Go to the bounty page at Bountysource.com and pledge what you can.  The more the community offers, the more motivation developers have to take on this challenge.  It’s not easy what we’re asking for — whomever takes this on deserves a reward for their time, energy, and expertise.  What’s more, if no one solves this problem, you get your money back (minus Bountysource.com’s fee).

If you have the right stuff to backport Geary 0.4 to 12.04/Luna, dive right in.  Make sure you read the issue ticket first for all the stipulations.  This isn’t a simple matter of getting Geary to compile on 12.04.  You have to make sure anyone running 12.04 can install it via their package manager.  Yorba’s developers are willing to guide you along, offer advice, point out resources or commits that you might be interested in.  But you need to make it happen.

Just to show that we’re serious about this, Yorba has already pledged $500 toward this bounty.  We’re hoping the community will toss in more money to further sweeten the pot.  If everyone who has asked us to backport Geary 0.4 to 12.04/Luna offered $10, $25, or $50 toward the job, there would be no problem finding someone to do the work.

(Note: Yorba employees are prohibited from collecting any bounty money for Yorba-related projects.)