[Kolab-devel] Brain Dump of the Week: Ideas, Plans and Realities ...

[Sascha Wilde]

Hi *,

with this mail I want to give a short report at the current plans and
ideas for Kolab Server and results from the meeting Gunnar, Thomas,
Bernhard (Reiter) and I had last Friday.

Originally I would have loved to write this mail earlier and I would
like to write mails like this (giving some sort of Kolab Server related
"Brain Dump of the Week") way more often, but there is this little
thingy from the subject: reality (you know, it bites)...

Anyways, whats worth reporting?


1. Release Plans

As most developers will have noticed by now: we currently have two
active branches in the server CVS, HEAD and 2.2.x (called
kolab_2_2_branch).  How comes?  Well, like most things in live it just
happened.  ;-)

The main reason is, that Gunnar, to resolve
https://issues.kolab.org/issue3293 had to do some major reorganization
in HEAD, which lead to an rather unstable state for some time and so
we decided to create an (temporary) stable branch, which we could use to
make subsequent 2.2.x releases.

It comes to no surprise that now, that HEAD is reasonable stable to
continue development there, we have a bunch of changes and fixes in the
2.2.x branch only, which we will need to merge -- which in turn made us
wonder if this strategy was a good idea in the first place and if it
wouldn't be best to throw HEAD away and simply re-implement the made
improvements in the 2.2.x branch.  @-)

None the less we made the following decision:

- As already announced by Thomas: the next release will be 2.2.3 and
  made from kolab_2_2_branch

- Starting in parallel, and with highest priority after the 2.2.3
  release, we will merge everything to HEAD and make it the main (and
  hopefully only) development branch again.


2. Packaging and Distribution Future

The current official and only commercially supported platform for Kolab
is OpenPKG -- unfortunately the future of OpenPKG, technically and
politically (read business model), is unknown -- at least to us.  On the
other hand there is the contributed native packaging of Kolab server for
many distributions, with varying grades of functionality and stability.

Currently we are not sure what to make of all this.  It is clear that we
will continue to need one defined distribution with stability and
support standards for our enterprise business -- but this might not
necessary be OpenPKG for ever.  Besides this we want to make Kolab
server as attractive and easy to setup for users and developers as
possible, which not at least would mean to support good native
packaging, but once again the strategy how to achieve this with limited
resources is work in progress.

One thing we agreed upon is, that it would be nice to have all the
sources in a none discriminating package format (can you say "tar"?)
available, distributed and build able, so that one could easily build
Kolab server without having the pre-requisite of OpenPKG -- Gunnar
recently started a thread on this topic.


3. The Web Client

The current web client was a big step forward as it finally gave all
those who can't install an native Kolab client on there systems the
opportunity to joint he happy community of Kolab users.  But lets face
it, the current web client is no beauty queen and the user experience is
not comparable neither to the native clients, nor to the fancy web
clients of other systems (have you seen the zarafa client?).

Well, we had some talking on this and basically we all agreed that we
need some major improvement on this sector (which btw. includes the Web
Admin interface and the Free Busy View, too).  Currently the discussion
is open what the best strategy for the future will be, basically there
are two major options:

- Keep horde as basis for the web client, which would include the switch
  to horde 4.  As there is very little hope that the horde project will
  come up with a polished and shiny modern UI anytime soon, this would
  mean that we will have to invest a serious amount of time and work our
  self to contribute what would basically be a complete new horde UI.

- Alternative: ditch Horde for the web client part (we would keep some
  horde parts for the server functionality like Kolab Filter and Free
  Busy) and pull another, more fancy free software web client into the
  Kolab project.  This would of cause mean to heavily extend what ever
  candidate would be chosen, as currently none of the other web clients
  offers even near complete Kolab support...

The suggestion has been made to take the administrative (web admin)
interface as a kind of playground to test out our capabilities of
creating an modern, appealing and user friendly web UI.

In any case this will be one of the more exciting areas in midterm Kolab
server development.  We are looking forward to your comments...


4. More to Come

Finally there are some more exciting thing going on behind the scenes
which I can't tell you about currently -- stay tuned!  ;-)


That's all folks!
cheers
sascha

PS. Ok, it seems I failed in my attempt to give a _short_ report -- I'll
    try to be more concise next time...
-- 
Sascha Wilde                                          OpenPGP key: 4BB86568
http://www.intevation.de/~wilde/                  http://www.intevation.de/
Intevation GmbH, Neuer Graben 17, 49074 Osnabrück; AG Osnabrück, HR B 18998
Geschäftsführer:   Frank Koormann,  Bernhard Reiter,  Dr. Jan-Oliver Wagner
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