It’s finally done! Kube 0.1.0 is out the door.
First off, this is a tech preview really and not meant for production use.
However, this marks a very important step for us, as it lifts us out of a rather long stretch of doing the ground work to get regular development up and running. With that out of the way we can now move in a steadier fashion, milestone by milestone.
That said, it’s also the perfect time to get involved!
We’re planning our milestones on phabricator, at least the ones within reach, so that’s the place to follow development along and where you can contribute, be it with ideas, feedback, packaging, builds on new platforms or, last but not least, code.
So what is there yet?
You can setup an IMAP account, you can read your mail (even encrypted), you can move messages around or delete them, and you can even write some mails.
BUT there are of course a lot of missing bits:
- GMail support is not great (it needs some extra treatment because GMail IMAP doesn’t really behave like IMAP), so you’ll see some duplicated messages.
- We don’t offer an upgrade path between versions yet. You’ll have to nuke your local cache from time to time and resync.
- User feedback in the UI is limited.
- A lot of commonly expected functions are not existing yet.
- ….
As you see… tech preview =)
What’s next?
We’ll focus on getting a solid mail client together first, so that’s what the next few milestones are all about.
The next milestone will focus on getting an addressbook ready, and after that we’ll focus on search for a bit.
I hope we can scope the milestones approximately ~1 month, but we’ll have to see how well that works. In any case releases will be done only once the milestone is reached, and if that takes a little longer, so be it.
Packaging
This also marks the point where it starts to make sense to package Kube.
I’ve built some packages on copr already which might help packagers as a start. I’ll also maintain a .spec file in the dist/ subdirectory for the kube and sink repositories (that you are welcome to use).
Please note that the codebase is not yet prepared for translations, so please wait with any translation efforts (of course patches to get translation going are very welcome).
In order to release Kube a couple of other dependencies are released with it (see also their separate release announcements):
- sink-0.1.0: Being the heart of Kube, it will also see regular releases in the near future.
- kimap2-0.1.0: The brushed up imap library that we use in sink.
- kasync-0.1.0: Heavily used in sink for writing asynchronous code.
Tarballs
- https://download.kde.org/unstable/kube/0.1.0/src/kube-0.1.0.tar.xz.mirrorlist
- https://download.kde.org/unstable/sink/0.1.0/src/sink-0.1.0.tar.xz.mirrorlist
- https://download.kde.org/unstable/kimap2/0.1.0/src/kimap2-0.1.0.tar.xz.mirrorlist
- https://download.kde.org/unstable/kasync/0.1.0/src/kasync-0.1.0.tar.xz.mirrorlist