The Bongo Project reached its second milestone in its roadmap recently.

The release notes contain the complete list, but here are some details of what's new in this release:

• the brand-new "hawkeye" web administration tool;
• antivirus and antispam are now supported;
• support for encrypted SMTP sessions.

I've been doing a few things with Bongo recently too:

• Debian packages -- these have finally been finished for the new release, and are publicly available. Add the following lines to /etc/apt/sources.list:

  deb http://jonnylamb.com/debian/bongo debian-etch/
  deb http://jonnylamb.com/debian/bongo ubuntu-feisty/
  

• Man pages -- to shut Lintian up, I shoved some man pages upstream.
• Cleaning up import/ -- I'm trying to get the imported libraries gone as although they're convenient, they have reasons of why they're not great. I've been creating a number of patches to try sort out this problem.
• Looking at libical -- Although all the other libraries in import/ are rather generic (E.g. CLucene, cURL), the libical library is not. I suspect I will blog and post to bongo-devel about this later though, rather than now.
• Darter -- I spoke to Alex about a lightweight Dragonfly some time ago, and I've started on it. It will be a non-javascript way to get your Bongo junk across the web. It is aimed at devices like mobile phones or, mobile internet browsers (E.g. Nokia Internet tablets). This will be called Darter. Thanks to Pat for this name. It is a smaller Dragonfly, and the name seems to point to speed too!

I just wrote this little introductory guide to packaging using git-buildpackage. I'm still rather a rookie in both Git and git-buildpackage, so I hope it's correct!

This isn't going to be particularly interesting unless it is being read on Planet Bongo I suspect!

I got a second quote on the Bongo polos today. I won't go into the actual prices (ping me on #bongo if you really want them), but it is a lot cheaper than the first quote.

I have one more supplier to go to and I suspect I can get it even cheaper, but a question has been raised for people wanting them:

So please let me know what you want by recording it on on the wiki page. You can still sign up to get a polo now.

I hope I've remembered everything.

Update: Forgot to mentian a very crucial point -- 100 per cent cotton are roughly 5GBP more expensive!

Update: I must have been asleep when I wrote the last update -- 100 per cent cotton are more expensive, not cheaper -- arrgh!

There are a number of advances that SynCE has undertaken, and more to come!

Done:

• New release (obviously)
• New logo
• Repository clean-up: I spent a while today moving lots of things round, creating new branches, and deleting a lot! It is much more accessible now. This took quite a few commits, and as a result, SynCE and myself got on the 9th most active project, and 8th most active author respectively, of the day, on cia.vc!
• Debian packages of Subversion versions
• Bug tracker clean-up

• New website: The current wiki is straining and is becoming more complex I believe. The new website, although still a wiki, will have a slightly different purpose, as explained in the next point.
• New documentation in docbook form: Instead of putting installation instructions in the wiki, a docbook documentation module will be set-up. This is good because the source will be in svn and all the different formats (HTML, PDF, RTF, TXT...) can be built nightly. It will also be much cleaner than in a wiki, and another great advantage is that one can read it off-line. I will create a very easy-to-follow guide for people to contribute to this documentation though.
• New release into Debian: voc has agreed to sponsor release packages into Debian. Now that 0.10.0 is out, I can start working on these.

A new version of SynCE is finally out, after roughly a years wait!

This is the first version that supports Windows Mobile 5 out of the box!

Debian packages will be provided soon, and should be uploaded into Debian soon too.

How can SourceForge think it's acceptable to have such a slow and unreliable site? Everything, even mailing list posts, is stuffed full of adverts, and things like mailman have been ruined. Mail archives are just hideous and unusable, whereas mailman default is nice and fast. The forums don't remind me of any other internet forums I have seen and as a result are really very hard to use.

Two good things I can think of though: the project websites feel fairly nippy, and viewing repositories is left to stock ViewVC, which is very fast and usable. However, the cons far outweigh the pros. I guess that's why projects don't consider SourceForge these days.

The Bongo polo shirts are currently on standby as a logo is required. As black was decided on as the colour of the polo, then the logo will need to work against a black background.

Basically, what I'm asking is that someone comes up with a logo based on the official one that works against a black background, as the official one currently will not. You know me with anything to do with design!

Remember, the more colour that isn't transparent, the more stitches that will be required, and the more it may cost!

If you'd like more info, ping me on #bongo!

Update:

Apparently people can't even open PNGs these days. They seem to be fast at replying though, so should have a quote pretty soon.