Another intermediate Horde 4 release for Kolab-Server-2.2.4

Two days later than promised in the revised roadmap there is finally an "intermediate" release of Horde 4 for Kolab ready. With "intermediate" being the euphemistic word for "while it contains the dynamic calender that one is still pretty broken".

To install the release on a Kolab-Server-2.2.4 system the following commands should suffice:

wget http://files.pardus.de/horde4-20110224.sh
sh horde4-20110224.sh 

The usual warnings that went with the first Horde 4 release for Kolab apply for this release as well: Do not consider doing this on a productive server. This is just an early preview. And if you want to be able to see anything useful in the added calendar application you should ensure the user you log in with already has a calendar folder and has some data in it.

The state visible in the calendar frontend does not do the changes that happened in the backend any justice. But it can't be helped at the moment: While the Kolab backend for Horde is now largely complete the connection to the various Horde applications still need to be adapted to the changes in the backend.

Goodbye Hudson, hello Jenkins!

The Horde continuous integration setup switched from Hudson to Jenkins today. The switch was nothing I fancied because it meant fixing a number of CI setups that I created in the past months. However,.. with the core developer Kohsuke on the Jenkins team it didn't make much sense to stick to Hudson.

In order to make this switch feel at least somewhat productive I threw some additional updates into the pot. Here is a rough changelog:

• Hudson got switched to Jenkins so the former "hudson-install" repository was renamed to "jenkins-install"
• The PHP toolset for the continuous integration setup changed its name from "php-hudson-tools" to "php-ci-tools"
• phploc was added to the toolbox and most other tools in the set were upgraded.
• In addition I imported the latest changes from Sebastian Bergmanns Jenkins template into the horde-support repository. Thus we have two new graphics and some new plots for the jobs on http://ci.horde.org
.

IMAP capabilities of the Apache Zeta "Mail" component

I have been quite busy on the Horde Kolab_Storage component these past weeks. That involved working with four different PHP IMAP libraries:

• PHP IMAP extension
• PEAR Net_Imap
• Horde Imap_Client
• Roundcube IMAP

I will definitely summarize the results here at a later point as there are many IMAP and also PHP specific IMAP lessons to be shared.

Right now I was pondering over the Apache Zeta "Mail" component though. It is great that it is available as a stand alone component. And I know it has been described as "Doing mail right". Which it may do.

But when it comes to "Doing mail over IMAP right" I must admit that I'm not so certain. The code seems to be very weak in terms of IMAP capabilities and it apparently supports only a tiny fraction of the complexity the IMAP protocol offers. A complexity that is needed however to perform mail access in an efficient way. And a complexity that is also required for getting Kolab data access right.

What I would like to know is if my quick browsing of the code gave me the right impression. Is there anyone out there saying that the Zeta Apache "Mail" component can actually be efficient when dealing with IMAP? If so I would make the effort in adding another backend driver to Kolab_Storage and include this one in the comparison that will eventually result from the recent Kolab_Storage refactorings.

Horde 4 presentation at CeBIT 2011

Next month CeBIT 2011 will start and there will be a short presentation about Horde 4 at the Open Source Forum. It is scheduled for 2nd March 2011 at 16:45.

In case anyone wants to meet with developers from the Horde team during that day or around that day, some of us should be available in Hannover. Hope to see you there!

Edit: The schedule of talks for the Open Source Forum

Horde 4/Kolab road map update

The roadmap for Horde 4/Kolab that was published in November needs some adjustments. This represents an updated version:

• [06.12.10] COMPLETED - Horde 4 Portal + Mail
• [22.02.11] Horde 4 Calendar (alpha)
• [22.03.11] Horde 4 Addressbook, Notes, Tasks (beta)
• [12.04.11] Horde 4/Kolab Final

There were several factors that made the corrections necessary:

• The Horde/Kolab integration machinery needs some more work to allow using the new Horde 4 IMAP capabilites to the full extent in order to benefit from a major performance boost. This delays the release of the calendar.
• The number of pre-releases initially planned was just too high and needed to be reduced. This joins the releases of the other applications.
• The Horde development team decided on a final release date for Horde 4 so it is now possible to add a release date for the first stable Horde 4/Kolab release.
• Releases were switched to Tuesdays.

You are encouraged to watch the Horde commit stream. There are a lot of Kolab related commits flying by at the moment. More on the changes soon.

Ubuntu based Kolab-Server on EC2

During the last two years p@rdus published the new Kolab Server versions as ready-to-go Amazon EC2 images. These images were always based on Gentoo.

This base platform has recently been exchanged with Ubuntu as the underlying distribution. Since yesterday there is now a Kolab-Server-2.2.4 available as an image to be started and used for quick testing. You can expect all upcoming server version to be also based on Ubuntu. This does of course include the Kolab-Server-2.3 that will hopefully be released soon.

Instructions on how to use the Kolab Server images can be found in the Kolab wiki.

Horde Project Newsletter

The date for the next Horde4 release is drawing nearer and we felt it makes sense to provide another news channel for the Horde Project.

So we are getting ready to launch a new newsletter that will keep you up-to-date on the progress of the Horde Project. Delivered around once per month, it will contain highlights of the Horde project's development and provide insight into our features and project plans.

To receive Horde news please click here to sign up!

We promise to respect your privacy and will never share your email address with a third party.

Horde release cycle

• Horde 1.0.0: 1999
• Horde 2.0: 2002
• Horde 3.0: 2004

... and finally Horde4 in 2011.

The gap between 3.0 and 4.0 has been too large. The Horde team tries to keep backward compatibility within a major version. Probably nobody tried running a recent Kronolith from 2010 on Horde 3.0 from 2004. There'd probably be some issues and limitations but they should be minor.

While this kind of long term support may be useful for some edge cases it can also impede development progress. A good example are the Kolab drivers in the currently released version: Kolab support within Horde started to improve in 2006. At that time Horde3 was already the active branch and there was some very basic Kolab functionality in there. So the new code had to keep those interfaces stable. Which basically meant twisting and bending it into code that would do just that but otherwise be really problematic. That code is still a reality in the current stable release from Horde3.

This and similar problems did not pass unnoticed though and changes to the release cycle have been discussed internally for a while already. With the release of Horde4 approaching it now makes sense to discuss such changes with the Horde community. The envisioned target is a time based release cycle.

The discussion started today on the Horde development mailing list. Feel free to listen in or to add your own comments if you want to influence the direction of our future release mode.

Hudson Quickie

After my third Hudson repository using the same installation procedure it was definitely necessary to finally extract the whole Hudson specific part into its own repository.

It is nothing fancy as the installation procedure with Hudson is pretty straightforward anyhow. But maybe you want to get Hudson quickly running on your own Linux machine with a few standard plugins pre-installed. Then the repository might be exactly what you need.

Just clone the repository with

git clone git://github.com/wrobel/hudson-install.git

and follow the "Install" instructions in the README. Of course you can also just fork the repo in case you need your own predefined set of plugins installed into Hudson.

The Horde4 package mill for Debian

As mentioned before p@rdus intends to provide Horde4 packages for Debian beside the Kolab specific OpenPKG based build. The first steps of this process have been taken now and another Hudson based package mill has been created for the task. The new system bundles Horde4 packages for Debian after each upstream commit and lives here.

This is just considered a first step on the way to a full Debian release as there will be a fair amount of quality control required to get the packages fit for wider distribution. In addition the exact policy on how to handle PEAR packages on Debian is apparently still under debate. p@rdus will join this discussion now with a set of more than 50 PEAR based packages in tow.

The timing for this seems just right as there are still a few weeks left until Horde4 will see its first release. So there should be enough time to ensure that there are no major conflicts between PEAR based and Debian packaging.