mailpile : blog

Posted by Bjarni Rúnar on January 30, 2017 ( Content may be obsolete! )

Happy Belated New Year!

Thank you for your ongoing support and encouragement in 2016. Although there was no "big news" from Mailpile in 2016, development continued and I was happy to see a whole bunch of new contributors submitting patches, reporting bugs and chatting with us on IRC. It's wonderful to have a community.

As any reader of this blog knows, my track record when it comes to predictions and planning, is absolutely abysmal. I'm sorry.

However, I still want 2017 to be the year Mailpile hits 1.0. The project will be 4 years old this summer and we need to make a release. Here is how I hope to accomplish that:

1. Over the next few months, I will (with help from the community) chip away at the list of 1.0-blocking issues.

2. Once (most of) the blocking issues are resolved, a release candidate will be tagged, packaged and made conveniently (apt-get install ...) available for Debian and Ubuntu Linux users.

3. At this point, I will use some of the remaining Mailpile funds to hire specialized help to work on the Mac OS X and Windows integration and packaging efforts. With a couple of exceptions, I have been self-funding my Mailpile work since the beginning of 2015, so in spite of our failures to raise grant money, we do still have some cash in the bank (and our bitcoin wallets).

4. Once a release candidate has been published, we will ask our community of international translators to finish their work and try and get some "QA" work done to ensure the translations are accurate.

5. At this point, we will also encourage other Linux distributions to contribute build recipes so we can build packages for them as well.

6. Feedback from early Linux adoptors will be used to squash bugs, polish the code and clean up the translations, eventually leading to a 1.0 release. Whether the 1.0 release will be simultaneous for all three platforms is undecided.

I think all, or most, of these things can happen within the next 11 months.

Especially with your help...