End of a book : Johnny in Novell

Last day in Novell.

Started out as an intern in the GNOME team about 5 years back. Jumped between Evolution and iFolder a few times for different (voluntary/involuntary) reasons. Met a lot of good engineers. Had both good / bad times. Learned a lot work / non-work.

Gnomers,

I loved working on Evolution, Evolution MAPI (may not be perfect, but had a awesome time with it And i’m yet to cash in on the few beers i’ve been offered), Attachment Reminder (Trivial, but looks like you guys liked/hated/loved it), Redesign of Evolution search bar and so on. Best bug that I’ve worked on so far was changing a ’1′ to ‘-1′ in EText (Oh those early days! Had no clue what GDB can do.. Used hundreds of ‘printf’s, lots of coffee and tested the patience of office night guards and that adrenalin rush!). Thanks to Novell for the opportunity to contribute full-time and getting paid for that.

Special thanks to my mentor Srini. I’m looking forward for more new awesome fun things in GNOME.

Thanks.

I’ll miss the 1-1 coffee breaks talking games/gadgets/music, discussions on research papers that I don’t have a clue about, conversations during ‘tea breaks’ outside office (you would see me very inspired/productive after those sessions), thursday nights & nice friends that I found beyond ‘work’.

The End.

Push Email for GNOME Evolution’s Exchange MAPI provider (exchange 2007)

 

After few days of crazy bug hunting (and creating the same) , we have a nice push event notification framework for Evolution-MAPI. When Evolution is running all the changes happening in user’s mailbox in server would immediately be synced. This avoids those long fetches from server.  A short screen cast (watch in HD) :

Currently I’ve got “new mail” event handled and is limited to mailer. Would be working on other events. This feature has some major issues to be solved before it can land in master.

It is FUN !

 

Evolution MAPI : Debut tarball release & RPM Repos are online

We have started the tarball releases for evolution-mapi. It’ll be in sync with GNOME release schedule. evolution-mapi-0.25.3 is available for download [0].

Thanks to Suman [1], openSUSE repositories [2] are back online.

Matthew has repositories for Fedora [3] [4]

—-
[0] http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/evolution-mapi/0.25/

[1] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/evolution-list/2008-December/msg00097.html

[2] http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/GNOME://Evolution://mapi/

[3] http://mbarnes.fedorapeople.org/mapi/

[4] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/evolution-list/2008-December/msg00086.html

Evolution MAPI : Contributions… Testing… Bugzilla …

Development is more active after our move to new svn ! Julien (of openchange.org) has patched evolution-mapi to be compatible with libmapi 0.8 .Patches are welcome !

Some of the cool things with libmapi 0.8 is the possibility of having multiple exchange accounts (multiple sessions) in Evolution (Yep. you read that right! ). But they will hit the trunk little later .

Now more focus is on real world testing on servers other than few test servers we are running. What doesn’t work in different setups is something we would like to know and fix them all ! Thanks to those who have been reporting issues and TIA

NEWS :

+ evolution-mapi is proposed for GNOME 2.26. Yay !

+ we have a new product ‘evolution-mapi’ in GNOME bugzilla.

+ Wiki page is updated with information on building evolution-mapi .

Evolution MAPI : New SVN Repository

New SVN repo for evolution-mapi provider is created :

** svn://svn.gnome.org/svn/evolution-mapi **

This repo has :
1. MAPI Account setup e-plugin.
2. libexchangemapi – Backend code for talking to server using openchange’s libmapi.
3. Evolution Data Server backends for addressbook and calendar.
4. Camel provider (mails).

More information on building evolution-mapi is available here .

We will be creating a new bugzilla component in bugzilla.gnome.org for evolution-mapi.

[ Update Nov 22 : Please report bugs under 'evolution-mapi' product in GNOME Bugzilla. ]

The EXCHANGE_MAPI_BRANCH[1][2] is closed.

Builds (RPMs) will resume shortly.

[1] svn://svn.gnome.org/svn/evolution-data-server/branches/EXCHANGE_MAPI_BRANCH

[2] svn://svn.gnome.org/svn/evolution/branches/EXCHANGE_MAPI_BRANCH

Evolution Exchange 2007 (MAPI) Provider : Changes in schedule and more.

Code :

We have moved away from libmapi 0.7 to libmapi trunk (0.8 development) , so we can take advantage of the new APIs.

We will be constantly updating our code base to libmapi trunk.

http://www.go-evolution.org/MAPIProvider#Feature_Status

Currently :

Suman is busy in integrating meetings into evolution. (few more tasks left)

I’m currently working on finishing (completing) off the basic features in mailer and will move to optimizing the sync & more.

Schedules :

Sadly, we won’t be able to make it to Evolution 2.24 as we are late (details here). Meanwhile we will continue to provide pluggable packages and this will be available as a pluggable provider. 2.26 will have this.

Licensing :

Yay ! Very exciting day. Evolution licence change was announced by Michael Meeks in my talk this morning (Exchange, MAPI and Evolution) . Announce mail here!! .

Update 1 : GUADEC Talk available here

Got my openSUSE 11 boxed edition !

. yay!

Cool !!

Evolution MAPI Provider preview builds

Back from holidays.

Therez a lot of interest in Evolution’s MS Exchange 2007 connectivity. Worked on some preview builds for evolution-mapi-provider. This will be a standalone plugin RPM. These are temporary and will be discontinued once the code is merged in trunk.

Builds are available at http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/jjohnny:/evolution-exchange-mapi-provider/ http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/msuman:/evolution-mapi-provider/

evolution-mapi-provider is a work in-progress and lot of basic features are not available and *highly unstable*. It is expected to get into trunk for the next release ( Evolution 2.24 ).

Update (Dec 15 2008) : Please check recent posts for updates on this. Repository is moved to http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/GNOME://Evolution://mapi

Update (Jan 31 18:00) : Julien will be talking about OpenChange‘s libmapi in SolutionsLinux 2008. Evolution plugin is in there too!

Update (Jan 21 18:15) : Fedora 8 builds are available now

Update ( Aug 11 10:42) : Updated Repo URLs

Links : Announce Mail | Wiki Page |

In the NEWS : Srini on Planet GNOME | Jelmer’s Blog

openSuSE 10.3 Boxes.

Soon after the release of openSuSE 10.3 , Contributors recieved Boxed versions of 10.3. (I recieved it few weeks back) . Feels Good !!

evolution-sharp 0.15 release & TODOs

Last week I worked along with Varadhan for evolution-sharp 0.15 (tarball) development release for Evolution-Data-Server 2.21.1.

TODOs for evolution#:

1) Support recursion for calendars/tasks/memos (From Varadhan)
2) Provide mailer interface (Camel#)

GIT – The `cool thing` in a developer’s toolbox

I wish i had known GIT a few months back. It would have saved me form a lot of trouble (loosing half done work ..). Well this post is _not_ a (yet another) GIT tutorial.

Some of the workflows i like (and use) is something like this :

Interrupted workflow (taken from git-reset man page)

Suppose you are interrupted by an urgent fix request while you are in the middle of a large change. The files in your working tree are not in any shape to be committed yet, but you need to get to the other branch for a quick bugfix.

$ git checkout feature ;# you were working in "feature" branch and
$ work work work       ;# got interrupted
$ git commit -a -m 'snapshot WIP'                 (1)
$ git checkout master
$ fix fix fix
$ git commit ;# commit with real log
$ git checkout feature
$ git reset --soft HEAD^ ;# go back to WIP state  (2)
$ git reset                                       (3)

Isn’t that wonderful ! I was trying out svn + quilt. But very hard to manage.

Some resources :

• http://git.or.cz/course/svn.html – For SVN users : Understanding GIT.
• Fredrico : http://www.gnome.org/~federico/misc/git-cheat-sheet.txt
• git-svn man page : http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/v1.5.0.7/git-svn.html
• Nice starter git-svn tutorial : http://tsunanet.blogspot.com/2007/07/learning-git-svn-in-5min.html
• https://wiki.bnl.gov/dayabay/index.php?title=Synchronizing_Repositories#GIT_and_SVN (good one ! )
• http://youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8 – Linus talk ‘on’ GIT in Google (*not* how to use GIT)

My GIT Ref Card :

# Initialize a repo (like git init):
git-svn init http://svn.foo.org/project/trunk
# Fetch remote revisions:
git-svn fetch
# Create your own branch to hack on:
git checkout -b my-branch remotes/git-svn
# Merging in master.
git merge --squash foo-branch-name
# Do some work, and then commit your new changes to SVN, as well as
# automatically updating your working HEAD:
git-svn dcommit
# Something is committed to SVN, rebase the latest into your branch:
git-svn fetch && git rebase remotes/git-svn

GIT is fast (super fast) ! and git-svn helps you if you are _stuck_ with svn !

Now GIT has moved out of my ‘staging area’ to everyday use. Yay!! I use it for GNOME/Evolution (and GNOME just moved to SVN a few months back )

In the NEWS : Attachment Reminder E-Plugin (Evolution Plugin)

Note : Writing this post so that i don’t forget. ppl know very well about my memory.

After OpenSuSE’s HackWeek , Attachment Reminder made it to evolution/trunk and made it to Evolution 2.12.

People appreciated that and somebody (on irc) promised to send me some chocolates and bear (didn’t get it though!) .. Even though code wise itz simple to write. Anyway … it made it to Novell Open Audio (PodCast) , OpenSuSE News and GNOME 2.20 Release notes.

Links :

• Novell OpenAudio(PodCast)
• OpenSuSE News
• GNOME 2.20 Release Notes
• Evolution Maintainer – Srnivasa Raghavan’s blog (a.k.a srag)
• My HackWeek Video Report.
• Idea.OpenSuSE.org Page

Now gotta improve that code. I Love working on GNOME !!