The future of the 0Xtender for Thunderbird

[sam]

Hello Folks,

After several months of silence the OXtender project seems to be definitely dead and there are pretty much issues preventing to use the latest version productively.
I started to fix up at least the most annoying bugs because having a working Thunderbird client is just essential these days.

Unfortunately, the original author even removed the old bugtracker which was at least read-only for public. Also, there is no cvs/svn access at all. So I'm having a local svn fork for now.

Well, the bad news: The code is pretty ugly. This has to do a bit with the Mozilla APIs and especially with the Lightning API which is a horror + the historical evolution over TB2 and OX5. However, the extender itself is a spoiled can full of spaghetti and worms. You seriously need a glass of whiskey before looking into it (be warned). Anyway, its free so no reason to grumble - I just want to say that implementing any new features would presume a major cleanup first. So lets concentrate on the bugs first.

I'm not going/wanting to be the new maintainer of this code. However if somebody here wants to host such project, please let me know. I would be glad to contribute my changes back. And maybe there are more people wanting to contribute. An option would be probably to set up a project on SourceForge ?

This is my Changelog/Todolist at the moment:

CHANGES
- created a fork
- fixed generic addon Preferences button
- change TENTATIV to TENTATIVE state (typo), confirm state sync TB->OX still somewhat broken...
- 1 month event shift: fix uninit date() => date(0)
- fix case sensitivity on participant db => use COLLATE NOCASE in mail query or on table create
- workaround early-init-bug for organizerId (owner has got wrong mail account)
- display correctly participants and owner
- not closing connection/session properly => fixed mixed-up session code in chrome
- added code to save centralized preferences and use the password manager

BUGS
- fix confirmations
* ox6 appointment update does not react on confirmation in participants, probably a separate action=confirm request is needed ?
- snooze not working always ?
- dismiss not working ?
- refresh lag (refresh only changed items possible ?)
- do not delete existing events beyond sync limit
- do not ignore old events with end date inside the sync interval
* seems to use filter on JSON request already at ox6Handler, readAppointments()
* another filtering seems to be in CalendarSync, readAppointmentsReady() callback used later by readAppointments()
* some more in calOXCalendarHelper, getCalendarItems() ? used from calOXCalendar listener for refresh ?


..."Der König ist tot, lang lebe der König"

[joan-open]

Hi,

I am using licensed version of OX from over a year. One of the reasons to choice OX was that I could use OX connectors for Outlook, Mac, mobile, and Thunderbird, because I have Outlook and Thunderbird users . After a year the connector for Thunderbird still contains some bugs, and the worst is that the project seems dead.

For my users OX is a whole set: the OXserver, the connector for the "BlackBerry", the connector for Outlook, and also the connector for Thunderbird. If a connector is not working properly the whole product does not work correctly. I have users who still are not using OX because they want the Thunderbird connector, and I could not convince them to migrate to Outlook, ... for them OX is not working well ... and they can not understand that the Thunderbird connector is not a OX product, which is a OpenSource from another company. And they ask me: Why OX can not build this connector?, Why did you choose OX if they did not have my connector?

I like know what is the future for the Thunderbird connector?. It is necessari inform to my users that this connector is dead and they need to use ONLY Outlook?

......

This is the Bug connector for Thunderbird that NOT let us deploy OX to 100%:
"If we have a recurring oppointement where we moved some items and we try remove a single item that we not previously moved, then we lose all items that you had moved before."

[chris786]

Hello
i am very happy that the OXthender Project will be revive. One Reason for OX6 was the 0Xtender for Thunderbird, but you can't work with him if you have Thunderbird 3.1.XXX. So we working in the Company with the Webinterface and the old Thunderbird.

But I think OpenExchange Company should supporting the new Project Team with money and Hardware.

If the Oxtender for Thunderbird works - Open Xchange develop the Market with Company who don't have Outlook.
If you have a new Version I will test the Oxtender unter Linux with different Thunderbird Versions.
Chris

[Martin Heiland]

Hi,

i talked to the developer today, he'll look into the current situation and decide how to go on. I really appreciate the contributions made by fusionworxx so far. Of course Open-Xchange has a viable interest in supporting such great projects and we already spent a significant amount of money, promotion and all the support required to get the the OXtender for Thunderbird to where it is now. I expect some reaction in the next days, so hang on.

Greetings

[sam]

Hi Martin,

thanks for taking care. The biggest trouble I see is, Sebastian dissapeared about a half year ago, and at the same moment also all the stuff like his bugtracker, roadmap & webpage became closed for public and the official mozilla-plugin shortly available got vanished. So we have got a piece GPLed software to start & play with, but nobody maintains it and due to an inaccessible bugtracker & version control system also no community work/contributions are possible. Since quite many of the existing bugs are actually easy to fix, this is not an optimal situation. It would be great if Sebastian could say a clear word about the OXtender future from his perspective and if he is not going be involved anymore to let it put somewhere on Sourceforge or maybe make a public subversion access at Open-xchange site.

So - for the other folks above - I'm not really speaking about commercial or a mega-full-featured OXtender, but about having at least a minimal possibility to push this project a little bit ahead and do contributions/patches (with no warranty of course). I'm simply being annoyed by having own fork of the connector not being able to submit patches anywhere.

Btw: I'm going to ask some questions related to HTTP-API in another thread because I'm having troubles fixing the confirmation stuff...

Greetings,

Sam

[tsdauche]

good news - i hope this project will go on.
we had the same intention while switching to OX: connectors for thunderbird, outlook, iphone, blackberry, and nearly all other solutions...
thunderbird is used by many of our employees - some of them can't even change if they want to, cause they are using linux.
open-xchange ist a open-source project, running on linux, thats one of the great advantages and a reason not to use MS exchange.
i just want to say: please, open-xchange, support these projects like "oxtender for thunderbird" or "chat for open-xchange" and make open-xchange better every day. thanks a lot!
sysadmins can say "no open-xchange is better" for a while, but it realy has to be. otherwise a change to other groupware-systems is necessary for working-quality... groupware has to work these days, not 50 % but 120 %
thanks a lot once more

[Hibbelharry]

*crickets chirping*

Too bad. Really.

Greetings !
Hibbelharry

[sam]

Well, I've got already quite a bunch of patches for several issues here, locally. But since nobody wants to take care of it or actively cooperate, I'm kind of reluctant to do it on my own... Would be also nice to hear so statement from the original author.

[lukasz]

Sam,

what exactly would you need as cooperation? Unfortunatly I have no abilites in making software but maybe I could help outherwise. Also for me the Oxtender for Thudnerbird is very important, but at the moemnt already useless....

wbrgds

Lukasz

[moah]

Hi,

Well, I've got already quite a bunch of patches for several issues here, locally. But since nobody wants to take care of it or actively cooperate, I'm kind of reluctant to do it on my own... Would be also nice to hear so statement from the original author.

i could cooperate too. With a little bit coding, webspace and so on. How we can support you?

regards,
moah

[sam]

Hi moah,

well, it would be nice to hear some statement from the original developer here first. The code is GPLed but still, it
would be good to hear his opinion on this. No idea what happened with him.

Then, somebody hosting a repository / project website is needed - maybe at Sourceforge ?
As for my part, I can and I'm very glad to contribute any patches that I created / will create, but I have no resources to take care of the project hosting/maintenance.

[moah]

Hi sam,

Hi moah,

well, it would be nice to hear some statement from the original developer here first. The code is GPLed but still, it
would be good to hear his opinion on this. No idea what happened with him.

Then, somebody hosting a repository / project website is needed - maybe at Sourceforge ?
As for my part, I can and I'm very glad to contribute any patches that I created / will create, but I have no resources to take care of the project hosting/maintenance.

yes, I agree with you. But I have reservations, that the original developer doesn't say something about it. The last statement was from Matrin Braun about 1,5 months ago. And nothing changed in the meanwhile.

So, I think we should gave him a defined period of time and then bring a fork at Sourceforge. Otherwise OX releases OX Version 7 and the TB-OXtender is forgotten...

Bye,
moah

[sebastiankauss]

Hi,

I prepared a repository and a ticket system for all of your who want to help to improve the OXtender with patches, tickets, bugfixing or features.
Here is the URL:

https://www.assembla.com/code/open-xchange-thunderbird-connector/subversion/nodes

It is only mandatory to add a Assembla user (www.assembla.com) so that I can give you permissions to modify the files in the repository.

Within the last few month it was really my plan to implement more features, to do bugfixing or to communicate in this forum but in every week was busy with other projects and so the work on the OXtender was rescheduled by myself from week to week. So the plan from all of you to add patches and help to improve the OXtender is a great idea and I'm going to help you as often as possible.

Best regards,
Sebastian

[sam]

Hi Sebastian,

nice to here you are still alive ;-)

Great news ! Please add my new user "hello_world" at assembla to the project.

What workflow do you propose ? Everybody makes own branch, you review the changes and put them on trunk ? Or everybody works directly on trunk (hmm...) ?

What version did you initialy check in ? Is it the 1.7.5.6 or newer ?

I have some >10 patches at the moment in my local subversion. I could create some diffs and try to checkin them on assembla code.

What about removing all the TB2 and OX5 code ? I think a major cleanup is necessary, it is pretty messy at the moment.

regards,

Sam

[moah]

Hi,

nice to meet you .

Hi,
It is only mandatory to add a Assembla user (www.assembla.com) so that I can give you permissions to modify the files in the repository.

please also add my account "hoam" to this repository.

Bye,
moah