Entries posted in July 2013

Running a pristine operating system is fun. I keep going to run programs and finding they're not installed!

For example I'd planned to re-deploy the Debian Administration code-base this evening, but couldn't because fabric is not contained in Wheezy (#714421).

Thankfully backporting the package was trivial, but it was a minor stumbling block. I've hit a few of those recently.

Still in happier new my lumail mail client can now handle both adding attachments to outgoing mails and extracting them from incoming mails.

There are missing features which some people might expect and rely upon, such as:

• Threading support.
• GPG support.

But that said the scripting primitives allow interesting things to be done and I'm enjoying the experience of writing something so "major".

True I've got ~20 "stars" on github which isn't a great sign of popularity, but I have had some fun feedback and the client works for me.

I'm going to have to spend a few days working on TAB-completion code that plays-nice with curses, because that's a major irritation (and you can't mix/match curses & readline, annoyingly). But otherwise I think we're getting close to being complete enough I'll slow down.

Tags: fabric, lumail, wheezy | 5 comments

Having migrated my websites away from my ssh/mail box I'm going to upgrade that this weekend.

I've got my new mail client, lumail, working well enough to use exclusively, so the upgrade should be nice and simple.

I spent a few hours last night removing packages from my ssh/mail box to trim it down. Removing a bunch of Perl modules I used in my CGI coding, removing services such as nfs-common, portmapper, etc.

Today I'll have a stab at the upgrade. The only thing I have to be careful of is my backported/tweaked qpsmptd packages. I'll try the native wheezy version now it has caught up.

(I don't use any of the standard qpsmtpd plugins at all. Instead I have a separate tree of my own custom anti-spam and virtual-hosting aware plugins. They all work in a unified fashion. Using these plugins against a new version of qpsmtpd should be just fine. But obviously I need to test that.)

Work on Lumail is probably going to slow down now it is genuinely in use, but I'll keep an eye out for feature requests and missing primitives. Annoyingly I wasted 30 minutes just now implementing a plugin I'd already written: lumail issue #51.

I also need to step-back this weekend and reassess my hosting. When I was tweaking my slaughter setup I recently realized I have more hosts than I thought:

• Cluster running for Debian-Administration.org:
  • 4 x web nodes
  • 2 x database nodes
  • 2 x "planet" nodes
  • 1 x "misc" node.
• Personal stuff
  • 1 x ssh/mail host. (ssh.steve.org.uk/mail.steve.org.uk)
  • 1 x web host. (www.steve.org.uk, www.lumail.org, etc, etc.)
  • 1 x blogspam.net server (www.blogspam.net)
  • 1 x builder node - Runs buildd for producing my packages.

Total: 13 virtual machines. (+ one kvm-host)

Tags: lumail, wheezy | 2 comments

So, writing an email client, how did that turn out? Pretty damn well as it happens.

My views continue to range from "email is easy" to "email is hard". But I'm now using my home-grown mail-client for 100% of my personal mail-handling.

Writing a mail client did seem a little crazy when I started, but the problem breaks down into a few distinct steps and individually they're not so hard:

• Display a list of folders.
• Display a list of messages.
• Display a single message.

Once you've got that you're almost 80% complete. You're just missing things like "delete", "reply", "compose", and those things are pretty simple to implement.

I definitely made the right call in making it scriptable with Lua, because I've been able to write so many functions for working with mail. For example marking messages in all folders matching a regular expression.

The code is pretty well structured, and now I've got TAB-completion support on all primitives and user-additions I'm finding it a lot nicer to use.

The future? I'm not sure. But right now I'm very happy.

Tags: lumail | 15 comments

This week I made two releases of my mail client. Immediately after both releases I found bugs. Despite having been using the github source tree on my box for reading mail for days.

There must be a name for bugs that come up immediately after you've just made a release.

I'm torn between wanting to make a new release right now to fix the thing I spotted, or wait a few more days to fix a few other niggles.

Still I did write some cool code today:

1. If a mail is received on the list debian.security-announce
2. And the package in the Subject: is not installed on the current machine.
3. The mail is marked as read.

Sure this means that a package on my webserver won't be visible to me, but my upgrade tool will see that. It just decreases the odds I read about an update that doesn't apply to me.

ObQuote: "don't pay heed to temptation
for his hands are so cold"

Tags: bugs, lumail | 4 comments

Today I've made the 0.15 release of lumail, which has several fixups and cleanups.

The previous release included a rewrite of the scrolling code, courtesy of kain88-de. This release fixes a few corner cases in that update which caused empty messages/Maildirs to be highlighted - operating on such ghost-entries would cause a segfault. Oops.

I've received several more great contributions from 7histle, and trou and I'm very happy with the state of the code and the usefulness of the application.

The biggest outstanding issue is RFC 2047 header decoding. Converting subject/to/from fields to readable versions of their encoded form:

Subject: =?utf-8?Q?Blipfoto=20=2D=20Introducing=20the=20all=2Dnew=20Bli

This is annoying because I'm using mimetic for handling all MIME-related code, and this doesn't seem to offer the facilities that I need.

The current plan is to use the RFC-2047 handling from vmime, but I've fought with that library unsucessfully for two days now - and a further complication is that the library is included in Squeeze/Sid, but not the stable release of Debian.

In conclusion I still regard the client as complete, because I'm using it exclusively and I rarely get "foreign" mails. But there is one more push required to fix all the outstanding bugs which generall boil down to:

• Decode headers properly.
• Ensure all our input/output is in UTF-8.

Randomly I'm wondering if I can call out to Lua to do the header decoding. Add "on_header_field()" and display the results. So today I'll be looking at how sensible that is, probably not very.

Tags: lumail | 4 comments