development timeline

[Bron Gondwana]

Hi all.

We don't talk on this list as often as we should, so I thought I should
share a couple of photos with you.  This is the whiteboard in the
FastMail boardroom, where Robert S, Ellie and myself sat down with Neil
and worked out what we would try to get done while Robert is visiting
Melbourne for a couple of months.


 

To spell those goals out in words:

JMAP:
* mail
* calendars
* contacts

Contacts is already in production at FastMail.  We plan to have mail and
calendars on our beta server and available as an endpoint for customers
to test as well as in the open source server before 1 December.

Todo: use default alerts for calendar
Todo: tons of stuff for mail!
Todo: final bits of conversion to/from calconnect tc-api data model (which is being ported into the JMAP spec for calendars)

Xapian:
* language detection
* new database version indexing by GUID (avoid double-indexing when you
  move messages)
* updated snippet generator code that we're trying to get accepted
  by upstream
* new charset handling based on libicu (working on getting this
  upstream too)

We plan to do the GUID based indexing and the snippet generator in this
timeframe, maybe not the others

Backups:
* seem ready to go, just need tooling support
* tooling includes handling restore from DELETED mailboxes, which should
  magically happen due to SYNC RESERVE.
* progress indication will be handy for tooling to display to the user
  how the restore is coming along.

Charsets:
* new cache file format (v4) includes text version of the character set
  name.  This is an incompatible format change.
* uses libicu, which might be more CPU expensive.
* I'd like to make much bigger changes to cache to deal with 32 bit size
  limits and excessive repacks, but today is not that day.

LMDB:
* Robert has built an lmdb backend for cyrusdb.  Test it at least during
  this time.

Sieve:
* Ken is working on finding and integrating all the existing patches
  (i.e. variables, which has bitrotted significantly)

New Index Format:
* This is a giant ball of work, and it's been kicked down the road.  It
  will be a miracle if we find time.

Bugzilla and comms/docs:
* move all existing bugs from bugzilla and phabricator to github
* find existing out-of-date resources online and ask them to update or
  remove themselves.

Tests and builds:
* Get automated tests running on a bunch of different operating systems
  using the stack of blades now available at FastMail for testing:

08-front-03

3. release:
* draw a line in the sand and actually release the damn thing!
* need to test upgrades carefully
* need to update default config (unixhs, virtdomains, altnamespace)

And then we drew up a list of weeks starting from week 40, which is the
one which is just finishing now.

 


LMDB and the charset work are both running in our testing environment at
FastMail already (future and staging branches) and will make their way
to 'next' soon.  Next gets 5% real users, future gets one real user (my
personal email).

Have emailed Xapian upstream, still waiting for a reply.

JMAP calendars is really close.  The main job is getting the updated
Net::CalDAVTalk and updated test cases out so we can be sure we're
implementing the spec.

Bugzilla work is ongoing.

....

If there's anything really important to you that we've missed, feel free
to let us know.  It doesn't mean we'll make it a priority, because
obviously since we're paying for most of the work, we priorities the
things we need for our users more - but I'll do what I can!

(and yes, you did see that a 3.0 release is on our plans.  What's not in
this photo is that there will be another beta next week, and another one
probably every week from then out to the release)

Bron.


--
  Bron Gondwana
brong at fastmail.fm
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