Zachery Hostens wrote:

ive been using roundcube for a while, but always seem to have a problem after another.

today i enjoyed the most bizarre of these. (actually these have been on going)

fyi: cvs roundcube qmail-smtpd bincimap imap server

Pure CVS: after logging in i can send 1 message fine, any other message i try to send my browser sits there with the spinning logo "Sending Message" even after my smtpd log sends the message and disconnects the client from 127.0.0.1.

CVS + my identity-reply patch: every other message i send roundcube brings me back the the message list BUT:

• does NOT send my mail.
• does NOT bring me back to the compose screen.
• does NOT save the mail in anyway.
• does NOT give any message via logs/sendmail.
• does NOT give any message via logs/errors.
• does NOT even tell me it failed to send my mail.

Don't know what's the problem here. Have you configured a smtp_host in your config? RC uses the Pear Net_SMTP class if a smtp server is configured or PHP's mail() if not. Personally I have not tested RoundCube with bincimap and I'm not aware if its peculiarities.

(this is tested the past week+)

i also have an issue where ONLY every OTHER email i try to send gets sent. and the others give me no error/warning of ANY kind. im gonna try this without my patch later, but i HIGHLY doubt that is of any issue here. (yes, i had to type THIS VERY email twice, and attempt to send it 5+ times to get it to work)

now im experiencing roundcube throwing up the 'Invalid or Timedout Session' message
while i was composing a message (this one in fact,) and another time when it was sitting idle on one of the message list windows.

This is a known bug and is due checking the crated time instead of changed time in the session table. The current CVS version also provides a periodic keep-alive signal from the client to keep up the session while typing a long mail.

the more i update roundcube the more unstable it gets, and the more pure oddities i see that should never be seen in any type of software :x

An what do you update exactly? And what do you mean with unstable?

<flame> just from looking at the source/(making one patch) i have to say ive never seen code formed so 'oddly' to put it. there is a lot of stuff thrown around randomly and for no reason. just index.php has to look at 3-4 different variables to decide what to actually do in the request. global is used in almost every function of include files, its migraine causing.

So what's wrong when using database and IMAP connections as globals instead of passing the same five arguments to every function call? Please explain what you call "stuff thrown around randomly for no reason".

when i was creating my identity-reply patch i noticed the function i was modifying being called 3 times in one request, all hitting my peice of code. there are many other functions that are "designed" to do multiple tasks, which defeats the purpose of making them in the first place (ie: functions are suppose to be small simple peices of code to solve one problem, not accept 20 variables, and return any of 10 replies back :x)

Example please. I know that some functions are a bit blown up because of some changes in the concept.

php isnt my favorite but im willing to help. but now im afraid to touch anything cause it barely works, and its a pita to try to figure out how any of the code works, (or why it works?) :x

.. (i could go on but will stop here) excuse the flame, (take it as helpful-critism please) but i spent the last half-hour yelling at roundcube for not sending my email.

</flame>

I don't think that this was "helpful-critism". If you get a headache when looking at the code, then you better leave it. And if you think this peace of software "barely works" then I suggest to wait for a stable release or look for another product...

for the good critism: i do have to say roundcube is the most aesthetically pleasing designed webmail client there is anywhere. all others are generic 1995 html 1.1 <table>-thumping designed-to-make-users-nauseous kind of thing. or they are pleasing, though try to look like a desktop application which just DOESNT work for web apps.

i will take the time sometime this week to run roundcube through a debugger/strace-like tool and throw out a handful of ideas/ways to make roundcube just work. though i really dont want to throw a lot of time into roundcube if no one wants to actually push roundcube into as clean a codebase as it is an interface.

• Zachery

Please come up with some concrete suggestions instead of generally cursing the code. I know that it's not perfect since I'm not a professional software developer and I just started studying computer science one month ago.

Thomas

On 29 Nov 2005, at 16:20, Justus Pendleton wrote:

On 2005-11-28, Zachery Hostens roundcube@plastik.us wrote:

...

just from looking at the source/(making one patch) i have to say ive never seen code formed so 'oddly' to put it.

I can only say you must not have much experience coding if
roundcube is the worst looking codebase you've ever seen :)

I agree - with both of you: the roundcube codebase is quite nice for
alpha software and quite oddly formed.

Out of curiosity, is refactoring to a cleaner codebase on the roadmap
yet? Sometime after 1.0 is released it'd be nice to move to something
easier to develop with and maintain. PHPDoc style comments would be
nice as well -- or at least some sort of developer docs.

Yours, Craig -- Craig Webster | t: +44 (0)131 516 8595 | e: craig@xeriom.net Xeriom.NET | f: +44 (0)709 287 1902 | w: http://xeriom.net

On Tue, 29 Nov 2005 14:38:41 -0600, Rodolfo segleaur@gmail.com wrote:

<snip> > Roundcube might, if you are lucky and the stars are in alignment, work > as an every-day mail client for you. But don't count on it. > > I'm not saying roundcube is bad or broken or non-functional. Just that > it is alpha software. What roundcube needs are developers contributing > code, not frustrated users expecting a flawless and feature packed > experience from an alpha project sitting at version 0.1.

You know, just to give a light spin to this thread, I've been using roundcube as the primary mail client for about a month. there have been strange errors, but none of them seem to be reproducible (and none that a bit of tweaking haven't solved), so i would say that it's pretty damn stable, for an alpha.

Kudos to everyone.

Let me second this, I've been running no for about 3 weeks, and yeah, I've seen funny stuff, but I've been able to figure it out; either by myself or via this mailing list. What things RC lacks I've found workarounds for, or I just accept it since it's an early project that is still my top choice over the other web mail clients I have installed on this server, that my other users are still using. So the session times out too much, I changed session variable from 10 to 360 and it's no longer an issue. There's no signature, I've added it to the footer variable and now I have one. There are no filters, I've rebuilt all my procmail fitlers and they work perfectly, heck it was even fun for me to go back and learn procmailrc syntax after not using it for 2 years. Should we expect 'Joe End User' to do all this hacking to have a web mail client? No, that's why this is Alpha software. Personally I love the functionality RC provides and would rather see work done on the code so it's up to everyone's approval (I don't have a problem with it, especially since it's such a new project, but...) and then work on features.

Head trauma victim? More like a newborn that can already walk! ;)

Respectfully,

P

BTW, while I'm on this topic, since roundcube doesn't have a way to change the password, and I'm running Mac OS X.4 Server to boot, there's a really handy webapp for this that's also on Sourceforge at: http://sourceforge.net/projects/osxpass that i've integrated into the login template for the default skin. Anyone else running the same setup, and I can post the snippet of code for the template to integrate the two.

cheers, rodolfo