Friday, July 14, 2006

Spotlight

Lot many things have happened since my last blog. I am now a full-time Evolution Mail hacker and precisely the New Mail Maintainer for Evolution. Sounds thrilling, ain't it? ;) We are just finished with our SLED10 that we, in Novell, have been working sleeplessly for the past few months and the results are fantastic. Just check out why people love it, here.

Thats the quick update on what I am currently into. Lets run through the various other things, quickly:

LDTP, my passion and a project headed by my buddy, Nagappan, received a Google SoC through GNOME and Prashanth Mohan is already knocking it out.

The SoC proposal consists of three milestones: LDTP integration with jhautobuild, Evolution automation and LDTP Regression suite and Prashanth has started working on the second milestone and tinderbox integration is on the final stages to get upstream. For those interested, the log of a real test, run on the test server provided by Frederic Peters is here and a detailed log is here.

Two students, sp2hari and taggy from NIT, Trichy, spent 6 weeks as intern, as part of NOSIP, work like mad and contributed an awesome tool for LDTP called Record. Record captures the user actions on any application and generates a LDTP test script that can be played back. This makes generating-test-scripts easier - simply, automated test-script generation.

Evolution
After a mammoth effort by the team and the community, Evolution 2.6 is stable and sleeker than its previous versions.

Recently, Phillip Vanhoof came up with the idea of mmap()'ing CamelFolderSummary instead of fread'ing it. We had around 2 hours of discussion and shared my experiences on CamelFolderSummary and other related things that he should consider when implementing mmap(). He has some 12 versions of patches and is close to what I asked for. Kudos!! Phillip.

However, the behaviour of the patch is yet to be analysed on various other scenarios: Couple of them are 1) When messages are deleted, 2) When message flags are changed.. etc.

Moreover, before taking upstream, the patch should be tested on a decent sample size using evolution and all the folder operations should be verified. Also, the patch should give a choice to the user/application to choose between mmap() and fread(). Guess, with said final touches it should make it upstream. Phillip? ;-)

That's all for now.. stay tuned!!