Minutes March 4/5th

[Bron Gondwana]

Another one!

2.5 was released!

Spoke about the autoconf changes for Netbsd, which didn't make 2.5.  They need to be made compatible with the linux builds as well, so we have to figure out why they didn't work.  Anthony needs a Linux build env to test on as well.

strdup versions - there are tons in there.  I spoke a bit about xstrn?dup and xstrdupsafe/xstrdupnull.

Basically, if you want to be NULL safe, then xstrdupnull is usually the right choice:

struct.userid = xstrdupnull(userid); is the same as
struct.userid = userid ? xstrdup(userid) : NULL;

Which is normally what you want, and safely free()able.  You can. Also use xstrdupsafe, which is xstrdup(userid ? userid : "");

Likewise, strcmpsafe() and strcasecmpsafe() treat NULL and "" as equal, and are great for a bunch of usecases.

When building variable length strings, struct buf is probably your friend.

...

SUPPORTING OLD VERSIONS: we probably want to backport SSL support for killing SSLv2/v3 back to cyrus-imapd-2.2 and 2.3 branches, even if we don't actually make a release.  Apart from security, we only support 2.4 and 2.5 now.

Talked about ceph and using a object store in the way that FastMail is currently using the "archive" code, where the current week's emails under 1Mb are stored on SSD, and everything else archived off to big disks.  Ceph could be linked in (librados) to be the object store instead of using filesystem operations for the email content.

Phabricator has a "folio mock" - like a shared whiteboard, kinda.  We can post photos of real whiteboards for discussion.

Talked about old libical version on Redhat which doesn't work for HTTP.  For now just say "you can't use HTTP on there", and hope that by the time 3.0 comes out, people have moved!

Anthony is going to look more at search.  Talked about how it's been integrated into the FastMail branch, and the history on that.

Tech writer - decided it probably should be someone in Melbourne, and Bron is looking.  More someone for FastMail who also does some work for Cyrus rather than a Cyrus project specific person - we don't have enough work to justify that, and Simon and Jeroen are already doing a great job with the docs.

Right now the FastMail branch of Cyrus has Squatter engine, Sphinx engine (not being maintained and probably broken) and Xapian engine (written up in lots of places, and running in production at FastMail):

http://blog.fastmail.com/2014/12/01/email-search-system/

Bron.


-- 
  Bron Gondwana
  brong at fastmail.fm