Category: General

I just returned today after a 10 day vacation for Diwali. Reaaaly away from mails, blogs, code and now I must have a huuge back log and a release tomorrow ;-). Oh, I took Mysore express  to reach bangalore, which is a 13 hour overnight train ride from my town to Bangalore. I got seats in the first cabin an air-conditioned coach and there were three other couple on the same cabin. Just in 10-15 minutes after the train started moving, my wife cautioned me of couple of cockroaches and I caught with a tissue and threw them off and the couple opposite to me was smiling at us and I didn’t realize it. Just a few mins later, we happen to see atleast 20-30 cockroaches roaming around the cabin and I now I understood why they laughed and they told me they too caught a couple of them out off the cabin and realised that there were too many to do so. We reached to a point, where we felt there are too many and can’t travel and we complained to the TTR [coach-maintainer] where he called some attender to pour some liquid [doubt, if it is a anti-insect chemical]. Just in a matter of 10 mins, we happen to see few hundreds of them out there of variying sizes coming out of the a/c duct on the first cabin. Sucks…  The only weapon we had was a rolled-newspaper with which we hit to kill them that comes towards us and tired of it, me and another couple with a sweet little girl ‘Tanisha’ almost surrendered our tickets and asked for a seating ticket and got one which was the same cabin, but 5feet away from our old one. Still the issue of cockroaches but better. It was almost 12.45 am when I could get a sleeping berth for my wife and around 2am I got one and I almost slept the entire day sleeping :(. WTF Indian Railways [supposed to be big/old org]  make it a must to pest-control train compartments. People with kids were always scared of insects roaming around to enter ears or over their heads. Anyways we had nice time that each and every one on my cabin was using that single rolled paper to pass around to hit the cockroaches and other idenifying the ones roaming near them… lots of fun though. Its not scary as ‘Snakes on the plane’  but definitely disgusting

We released 2.23.5 with the basic merge of disk summary. Ever since, It has become a busy working week. Working more than 12 hours day and almost all 7 days of work for me. It happened that Sankar’s db search didn’t work well for us and I started writing a sexp to sql parser and completed that in almost 4 days. It feels so good, when you do things and that works awesome with out much issue. Now almost everything in search is completed. Except body-contains query, everything else is just searched on the db with out being loaded to the memory and results are shown. Now, Im going to rework search folders, to do it. Thanks to Milan, who fixed two serious issues in Disk summary.

I started fixing IMAP, to take advantage of disk summary. I just happen to uncover a excellent bug, which I myself hated to see. At times, you see an already read mail in Evolution, but the cache seems to be missing, though you are sure that you read that mail in Evolution. It was so annoying that you would be offline while seeing this. I finally found the core issue and fixed it in camel-imap-folder.c:imap_rescan. The main issue is

If client has uids 1,2,3,4,5,6… and server deletes uid 2 on auto-expiry  or some other way, then Evolution use to delete all summaries from 2 till end and its cache and redownload the summary. I have also seen that at times, Evolution take more time to download summaries, specially if Im back from a vacation or so. This is the reason. If at all you are using 2.22.x (where all mails not just RECENT are filtered) and you have a filter to archive mails, you endup downloading duplicate mails to your archive folder. Anyways, I fixed it finally. Im planning to do some more imap improvements during my free time. IMAP should be much better in 2.24.

We have created a tracker  Bug 543389 – Camel Disk summary bugs (Evolution). Add all disk summary bugs to this tracker. Try Evolution 2.23.6 and file bugs.

I’m gonna start to Istanbul for GUADEC 2008 in another 2 hours. I should be there Sunday evening at Istanbul and would be staying till July 13. I’m gonna present two talks

• Evolution On disk summary
• Evolution, the Road ahead

These explains about some of the interesting things that we are working for Evolution, for GNOME 2.24 and GNOME 2.26/28. Me, Chenthil and Johnny are traveling together this time.

Last two days I have been working on deskice integration with Evolution Calendar and Tasks. It was all that fun at the end of day #1 to know that it is better to have a icecore server deployed locally otherwise I may end up hacking/fixing deployment bugs. I finally deployed one at localhost and using it. Now I have have a basic plugin, that

• Creates an Calendar and Task accounts per every team the user is part of
• Creates Calendar and Tasks folder under those accounts, mapping to the calendar/tasks of that team.
• The calendar and tasks are web-calendar from icecore and the webcal url seems to be persistent and pubic.

With all these, when you login to deskice, your GNOME desktop would have calendar and tasks of your team into Evolution. You clock applet shows your meetings and tasks. It is just that it is all read only now. Yesterday I had a nice chat with Brady, who gave me more insights on this. Now I’m gonna hack at the web service api to give it a write support, so that I can create meetings, tasks in Evolution which would appear against your team/members in T+C icecore.

It is really great working with Michael Meeks, Brady and others. I wish Hackweek is more frequent.

I just send an announcement mail to the evolution hackers list about the Evolution hackfest. We are planning to fix crashers that are marked with the ‘stacktrace’ keyword on Tuesday Jan 22nd. The keyword typically mean that the crasher has good stack trace that will be useful for the developers to fix the bug.

How can you help us?

• If you know of bugs/crashers that are easily reproducible and aren’t part of the list, please add to it to the wiki ( http://www.go-evolution.org/Hackfest ).
• If you have filed crashers before and have good traces/debug information, but aren’t marked with stacktrace, please add keyword then.
• You can hack with us and fix Evolution crasher bugs. We would be on #evolution on GimpNet working on Jan 22nd all through the day.

Thanks in Advance 🙂