A parting gift

I have become increasingly unreliable concerning my activities within the Gentoo developer community during the last year. Now I finally arrived at the point where I consider the only reasonable solution to leave the Gentoo team. The final drop has been the fact that I promised Sebastian the next layman release. But week after week I did not find the time to work on the next version thus failing the promise.

With my commercial endeavours within the Kolab and Horde communities thriving I have to be realistic: The workload won't suddenly fade during the next year(s?). I would have liked to include Gentoo into the portfolio I get paid for but I was unable to achieve that. Chances are that I would be even less responsive concerning Gentoo in the future.

This is no easy decision for me as I do like Gentoo and feel strongly for some of the stuff I did for Gentoo. It is not easy to drop these projects. I would have made the choice earlier in order to clarify the situation if I would not care that much about Gentoo. But I left people with an unresponsive maintainer this way and I'm sorry for that.

There is one final thing I'd like to leave as a parting gift to the Gentoo community.

As some of you may know I wrote a german book about Gentoo. When I initially started the project I asked the publisher if there would be any possibility to produce a free version of that book, too. Writing about free software feels strange to me if the things I write are not free. But books are not software and I had to accept the commercial realities of the project at that time.

But I mentioned above that things for my little one-man-company are going well and so I did buy the rights to my book back. It has now been published under a free license and is available for download here. The latex source for the book is here.

Time to say goodbye. Sigh...

layman moves from subversion to git

In preparation for layman-1.2.4 the repository has been converted from subversion to git. The new repository can be found at git://layman.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/layman/layman

layman-1.2.3 is out

The next layman version has been released and fixes a few minor bugs:

• Support setting the terminal screen width (#253016)
• layman -S fetches each overlay twice (#253241)

I can't seem to get layman bug free these days. I already wanted to mark the newer version stable months ago. Let's hope there'll be a longer bug free period now ;)

layman-1.2.2 is out

The next layman version has been released and fixes a few minor bugs:

• layman -L: better use of screen real estate for source URLs (#251032, submitted by Martin von Gagern)
• Execute subprocesses in a shell. (#235165)
• layman/overlays/git.py (GitOverlay.sync): app-portage/layman - 'layman -S --quiet' yields "git: 'pull-q' is not a git-command." (#247964)

Thanks to all the contributers!

layman-1.2.1 is out

The next layman version has been released and fixes a few minor bugs:

• Fixes for python-2.6 (#237625, submitted by Mike Auty)
• Better locale support (#235165, submitted by A. F. T. Arahesis)
• Handle git+ssh://, ssh:// correctly (#230702, submitted by Donnie Berkholz)
• Do not remove directories if adding an overlay failed (#236945)

In addition there is a feature enhancement:

• Pass --quiet flag down to the version control system (#236165, submitted by A. F. T. Arahesis).

Thanks to all the contributers!

Distributed burden

I just found my old layman article is available for free. It probably has been accessible for a while already but I didn't know, so I thought I mention it here. It has been written for the German Linux Magazin so it is available in German only.

As a response to this little article I got a short e-mail about a week later. Patricia Jung asked me whether I'd be interested in writing a whole book about Gentoo. And I was. As people probably know...

Editing posts in blogger.com without getting them in the RSS again?

Sorry for spamming planet.gentoo.org with old stuff. I simply edited labels on old posts which apparently modified the last edit date and pushed them into the RSS feed again. Any hint on how I can prevent such a thing when blogging via blogger.com?

Horde_Kolab_Server-0.1.0 and Horde_Kolab_Format-0.1.1 have been released!

The Horde project released the second PHP PEAR package representing a small subpart of the Kolab functionality within the Horde framework: Horde_Kolab_Server.

The package allows to access the Kolab LDAP database. Some examples are being given on a page in the Kolab wiki.

The package is the second in a series of five packages that will be released over the next few months. The full set of packages will allow you to easily deal with data stored on a Kolab server within your own web applications.

In addition the Horde_Kolab_Format-0.1.1 has been released. This is a bug fix release.

Kolab on Gmail

In the recent weeks the Kolab specific code in Horde has been significantly restructured to make it more developer-friendly. This cleanup also made it easy to add a small hack that allows you to run Horde with a standard IMAP server that provides no support for folder annotations as a back end.

The Kolab concept is based on IMAP folder annotations but so far the feature is only being provided by the Cyrus IMAP server. In addition the Kolab Server uses some patches in that area which means that you always need a full Kolab Server as a basis for Kolab specific development.

For Horde this means that the other developers have no chance to test the Kolab specific code sections even if they sometimes need to touch these areas. But installing a Kolab server is too much of a hurdle.

So I always wanted to allow running the Kolab code on a plain IMAP server. And ever since Gmail started providing IMAP access I considered the idea of Horde/Kolab on Gmail as a back end a nice toy thing.

Today the code that allows this went into Horde CVS. It is far from finished but it is sufficient to provide you with a demo installation.

You can use standard Gmail credentials there. But please be aware that I could grab these credentials! So you should only use a dummy account in your own best interest.

You'll certainly find many bugs or things that are not working yet but it is of course just a demonstration.

This line of coding is something I won't invest too much time into. It will never get any support from Kolab (as using annotations is the better solution) and I don't guarantee you that the format I'm using stays the same. So if you'd start using the code in a production environment the next upgrade might prevent access to the old data.

The main intention of this is to ease access to the code and allow more people to play with it.

The way things work at the moment is a special Kolab XML format for storing annotations. Each folder gets a single message in this format that carries the UID "1". This message holds all annotation values you'd usually store as folder metadata.

If you want to configure a Horde CVS installation specifically for Gmail you will still need to patch some IMAP parts. For other IMAP servers this might not be necessary.

First part of SyncML concluded

p@rdus completed coding on SyncML for Kolab a while ago and after some serious testing Univention uses the code in production.

In addition a short press release has been issued on several channels.