Today saw a quick-release of Sylpheed-Claws 1.9.100, due to a minor security issue: Colin discovered and fixed three buffer overflows in the addresss book Import LDIF/Mutt/Pine functions. Very minor security issues, in my opinion, as most people will probably never use these functions, (I never have), and they are pretty much use-once things. All the same, we decided a release that fixes the issues was worthwhile.
Unusually, today's release went off without a hitch. The notes for this release can be found here, another large amount of changes. 1.9.99 will probably be the final release before version 2.0.0.
I registered the project, and added the first listing, at OpenUsability.org. Having the project listed there is intended to "serve as a collaboration platform for Sylpheed-Claws developers and OpenUsability experts", whether this will bear fruit remains to be seen. I am not sure who these 'usability experts' are, or whether they have anything of worth, (or even just anything), to add to the project. Theoretically, it could be a worthwhile exercise…
Today saw the release of version 1.9.15 of Sylpheed-Claws. The Release Notes are here. All in all a relatively painless release - only small SourceForge troubles, (no SF mail was getting through, so the translators who were waiting for sylpheed-claws.pot didn't get to see my message until it was too late), almost all translations arriving on time, ReleaseForge more or less doing its job. (I had to patch ReleaseForge to get it to work, (see here), and re-submit the SF News item afterwards, as ReleaseForge had apparently disposed of all the linebreaks.)
I also created a separate project at freshmeat for new release listings. Mainly so we can clearly emphasise that Claws is still GPL, whereas main is now LGPL, and also to help dispel the myth that Claws is Sylpheed-Testing.
We hope to have a new manual for Claws complete and ready for the upcoming version 2.0.0, ETA 90 days or so. There are 3 of us who have pledged support so far, (Ricardo, Abhay, and me), and one more potential contributor.
I have set up a mailing list to help the coordination effort, sylpheed-claws-doc-writers, open to anyone who wants to lend their time. Go subscribe now!
The Claws site has been redesigned in the style of Planet Sylpheed. It was a long time coming, but now it is there - and not a tooth or toothbrush in sight. It may still need a little tweaking. Next will be updated content.
An image of the old design is included here for the incomplete historian.
Debian is my distro of choice, but it is sometimes a little slow getting new packages - I mean, sometimes you must wait several days for a new release to enter the official repository, (did someone say impatience?). So, for the impatient Claws Debian user, who is not 100% restless, (i.e. doesn't use experimental), we have made packages for SID (unstable) available, (x86 and AMD64).
These packages have been created by Ricardo and are the very same Claws packages that will make it into the official repository. They are Claws 1.9.13 and 1.0.5. An unofficial libetpan 0.38 package has also been created by Ricardo, especially for Claws 1.9.13, this package, however, will not reach the official debian repository as Ricardo is not the libetpan maintainer for Debian.
deb http://claws.sylpheed.org/debian/ unstable main
deb-src http://claws.sylpheed.org/debian/ unstable main
Yesterday saw the release of Sylpheed-Claws 1.9.13, among the highlights were support for GPGME 1.x, which was not too soon, further IMAP improvements, thanks to Hoà's libEtPan!, optional extended printing support, using libgnomeprint2, and, probably of most use for me personally, (cutting down on build minutes), the PGP/Inline plugin was brought into the main source tree, (previously it was one of the External Plugins).
The release process went along nice and quickly once the notes and packages were created, thanks to ReleaseForge, which allowed me to create the release and submit the SF news item in what seemed at least half the time it would have taken using SF's laborious FRS , just beating release day SF downtime by a matter of minutes.
The SF downtime did bite, however, during the Freshmeat announcement submission as Freshmeat failed to verify, first, the ChangeLog url and then the CVS tree url. After a few hours of staying away it was fine, of course.
ReleaseForge's freshmeat announcement support failed again with the message, "Unable to login to Freshmeat. Please verify your username and password". I'm quite sure, though, that this has nothing to do with names or passwords, and that the real problem stems from the fact that there is no project on Freshmeat called 'Sylpheed-Claws', as Sylpheed-Claws, (on Freshmeat), is a branch of the Sylpheed Freshmeat project, and that is more than ReleaseForge can cope with. However, I don't want to do ReleaseForge down, as its support for the SF FRS is surely every SF project admin's dream.
The sylpheed.org domain name is now under our control, the website is now being hosted by develog.com, and all traffic to sylpheed-claws.sf.net is being redirected to claws.sylpheed.org. Planet Sylpheed is now openly accessible so I added a link to it from the menu bar of the claws' pages.
Currently listening to: Donald Byrd, "The Emperor" (Ethiopian Knights)