I’m at the point of (naively) believing that Tinymail‘s thread difficulties are all solved. The developers working on Modest seem to be telling the same thing (today’s quotes from the developers: “Modest is quite robust today”, “yes!!! it works”). Whoo!
The POP code had some difficulties too, mostly related to deleted and deleting messages. These have all been fixed too. We have bugs like a translation bug about the SSL-question text: it’s not yet translated to your locale. That type of bugs. Still too much such bugs, in my opinion. An E-mail client has quite a lot of functions to support, if you just want something very basic (you’d be amazed). We’re getting there and I have this (again naive) feeling Modest is going to please most people.
Next week will be an interesting one as I’m planning to do a release candidate of Tinymail. That’ll be an actual tarball and a branch tag in a “releases” sub directory of Tinymail’s repository. We’ll make sure Modest’s repository will be synchronized and tagged with this RC. I’ll make sure all the build information will be available. Chances are high that we’ll put some packages for N800 online too. That’s not a promise, though. Especially not for Modest (I don’t make such decisions for Modest, but I can probably prepare packages for Tinymail on N800).
I’m expecting quite a lot of bug reports. Especially if we’ll provide packages, as that will increase the amount of people who’ll try it out of course. I will make test accounts available for people who don’t yet trust Tinymail with their precious E-mail data. I will also prepare a QEmu image with an IMAP server and some test data. Although this QEmu image will only be bundled with a release officially when I’ll do the final onepointzero release.
It has been a year and a half of hard work, especially last few months, but I think it’s getting ready now for beta phase, yes.
If people want to help with all the “make distcheck” work, let me know. I’m not very optimistic that a lot people will, doing a release is really boring work. That’s because, and I repeat, all our typical development tools (autotools, gtk-doc, etc) suck and are absolutely not synchronized with how developers really work.