hacking

The last few weeks have been mostly filled with hacking hacking. I'm neck-deep in the implementation phase of a big new set of features, and it's taking forever. But I think I'm finally past the hardest part, the design issues that remain to be solved are at last medium-sized ones instead of huge ones, and even the unit tests pass. So I'm feeling pretty good about that.

I'm also trying to hack on Petmail a little bit more. There's a spam conference at Stanford next week that I'll be attending, and even though it's unlikely I'll be showing it off to anyone, I'd like to be sufficiently back in the Petmail mindset that I can discuss it intelligently while I'm there.

I'm trying to shift Petmail's configuration interface from the current Gtk app into a web page one, using Nevow, because eventually (when Bill gets some time to work on the Thunderbird plugin) the send/receive mail interface will be through XMLRPC (or whatever Mozilla code can get to most conveniently). I haven't figured it out yet, though, nevow provides some nice features for free, but I don't yet know if they're the ones that I need to implement this sort of add/edit/remove configuration stuff.

Also, I'm moving Petmail development over to Darcs. I've been a bit frustrated with my recent Buildbot development push, because I'm using Bazaar on my laptop, with a local repository so I can make commits offline, but pushing changes back and forth between repositories is enough of a hassle that I just don't do it. So I'm doing all the buildbot work slouched over my laptop (which I really like, but the keyboard is making my hands just a little bit uncomfortable), rather than the desktop with the proper keyboard and proper chair. It looks like Darcs would make it a bit easier to fling changes from one place to another, so using it might encourage me to do development anywhere I feel like. (plus, I should really get a new monitor for the desktop machine.. my ex-brother-in-law has a gorgeous 20" LCD, something from Dell, which I'm really tempted to splurge for).

So anyway, there's a Darcs tree for Petmail available at http://petmail.lothar.com/repos/trunk , which replaces the old CVS repository on that same site. I don't have a Darcs equivalent for ViewCVS up yet, though. I've seen a web-based Darcs patch viewer, but I wasn't really impressed. So I'll keep looking.