Support for the Lemonade IMAP condstore capability (RFC 4551) has been added to tinymail. This is the first support for a Lemonade feature. I added a point of view page on the subject to the tinymail documentation. It outlines the strategy that tinymail developers (as I’m no longer the only one) will take to one day let tinymail become a MUA framework that will outperform existing commercial solutions like the Blackberry E-mail software. That’s, indeed, what I’m aiming at.
From a financial point of view I’m taking things more seriously now. I now understand that there might be commercial interest in the framework. I also understand the simple fact that I could die in a car accident tomorrow, is a major risk for companies interested in adopting tinymail. For this risk reason, I’m building up a network of TnyPartners who can help customers with tinymail consultancy. I’m being at FOSDEM next month, so catch me there if this sounds interesting to you.
Rather than see this as competition, I’m planning to actively help both customers and those partners finding each other. If I would make this a competition-battle between me and them, the risk reason would turn it against the project. I’m aware of that.
My biggest concern is keeping the project a healthy free software one. Ever heard of Peter Principle? I have and I’m aware of my own limits. I’m not (yet) much of a project-leader (but hey, I have started reading books on emotional intelligence. Soon maybe). I think most people by now understand that I’m the engineer type of guy, who passionately and unstoppable enjoys building software.
This is one of the reasons why I haven’t yet done any releases: it would put an extra burden on me and it would awake the crazy “I hate and bash everything”-people. I’m not interested in that. Since tinymail is for software developers, I figured that those guys can checkout from the subversion repository. Some day, however, I will release something. Nevertheless, if somebody wants to be that project leader or release maintainer, call for it.
Did you push the CONDSTORE patch to the EDS bugzilla yet? It would be great to see this in G2.20 (shame it’s too late for 2.18).
No, not yet. Normally this patch should be very easy to bring to eds’s Camel indeed. I did use some of the things that are new in camel-lite, but those are easily portable between the camel-folder-summary.c of eds and the camel-lite one.
More specifically, I need the index (of the GPtrArray) of a specific uid. This is something the current camel-folder-summary.c does not yet support. The reason for that is that the developer who originally implemented dealing with expunged messages decided to store the index in the array being passed, rather than uid’s (like what happens with items that have changed flags).
I can also fix that but then the patch would get quite bigger and less focused on the CONDSTORE feature.
Anyway, I will eventually make the delta suitable for eds’s Camel myself. I’ll welcome anybody who tries to do this if it’s really urgent (and I’ll help this person too, of course). If the Evolution team asks for this help, too.
I’m at this moment waiting for other patches to get handled by the Evolution team. Flooding them with patches was something I tried once, but didn’t work. So for this one I’m going to wait for them to handle the others first and/or when I have a few more Lemonade ones ready, I’ll create a more nice patch with more such Lemonade features.