European Bob's Hula Hoopla!

This is the first rev from the 5xx series I've written about, and at the speed we're going will also be the last - scary.

The last couple of revs had the new 'document' interface in NMAP, which is going to be used for a couple of useful things. But, it requires AUTOINCREMENT in SQLite - which, as proby rightly noted on IRC, is a SQLite 3.1+ feature. This gives us a slight problem: Ubuntu Hoary doesn't have that available. So, from now on, these packages won't work on Hoary unless you pull in a better libsqlite3-0 package.

This isn't as bad as it sounds: Breezy is out tomorrow, and is fine, and you can pull the single libsqlite3-0 package from there if you like. So, it should be a pretty temporary problem.

Incredible that I haven't blogged about the packages since r298, which actually wasn't all that long ago (three/four weeks ago?). But, we've jumped over a hundred revisions since then!

There have been a lot of changes then, so I'm only going to mention important points. First, I'm now building on Ubuntu Breezy. I've always tried to make sure that my packages work on stable versions of Ubuntu and Debian, and this should continue. I run my Hula server on Ubuntu Hoary, which is technically a few bits of software behind Debian Sarge, so things should work on anything newer than Hoary.

There is some interesting news in the changelog, if you can be bothered to look ;)

There have been a lot of patches since my last blog; mostly bugfixes. I've put in a new web admin UI which matches the main Aurora theme, I didn't really like all that Novell branding.

It compiled, and looks like it should work. I haven't run it, but am making it available on the basis that it seems like a load of small bugfixes that people should get. Let me know if it breaks your machine horribly :o)

But still very little new! Hopefully the Hula stable release will be like this :) I keep expecting large calendar-shaped changes to land, but they're still a ways off I think.

270 has a fair few bugfixes; the sendmail implementation is much more likely to work with webapps and things now.

... but really, again, not much new. I added some bugfixes posted to hula-dev, since they seem fairly obviously right (although, the IMAP one wouldn't apply - I wonder if the patch was edited manually ;).

There have been some upgrade problems apparently, so I've bumped the version of the library required.

So - there were some bugs in the initial connection manager code that Micah unleashed. I found an infinite loop, which was making the library send limitless packets (I knew immediately what was happening when Seb's firewall was dropping packets - mainly because one of the first things I did as a young network engineer was to swamp a firewall with an nmap scan, which rendered it unusable to everyone :).

There was also a problem with the authentication functions. This should now work for everyone - people with r244 may have had some problems with SMTP/POP/IMAP; if you still do have problems, let us know.

Well, given that I haven't actually updated these packages since r228 I guess that they were kind of dead anyway, although a couple of people did use them. I'm not going to do these any more, though - not enough people use them, and it's a pain to compile these on woody. Since sarge has been released as a stable platform, I'm expecting people to be using that as a minimum.

If people in the future find they want to compile Hula on woody, I am of course more than willing to share the work I did getting it going - drop by on #hula on freenode and I'll try to help.

So, my r244 package is finally here. This took longer, for a couple of reasons:

• this is the first time the MDB store has been upgraded to take account of a new schema. I'm not sure how well this will work, but it works for me and it's better than nothing - the alternative is still nuking the config;
• some of the patches needed updating, in particular, one seems to have bitrotted badly :(

Please backup your /var/lib/hula before you install this package.

This r240 package I have isn't actually r240 (that was my r239-4 package ;), it's r240 plus Rodney Price's new IMAP patch.

I've tested this patch on my local machine, and it doesn't seem to introduce any bad new instability. It improves the handling of attachments for people using IMAP - particularly, it should mean Evolution users are much happier - although there are still some bugs to be worked out.

Please send an email to hula-dev if you experience new IMAP problems with this package, or if things have started to work for you!