Help Needed: thunderbird-0.5 and other stuff

[Warren Togami]

https://bugzilla.fedora.us/show_bug.cgi?id=1113

Firefox and Thunderbird are the KILLER combination.  fedora.us Extras 
firefox-0.8 was released last week, but we still need your help in order 
to get the thunderbird-0.5 into acceptable release shape.  My personal 
time is too short to devote to this package now.

The last remaining blocking is probably a complete rewrite of the 
/usr/bin/thunderbird script so the following requirements are met:

1) It must launch first time without problems while mozilla or firefox 
is running.
2) It must not pop-up that ugly error message when you attempt to launch 
it while it is already running.  Ideally it should pop-up the already 
running thunderbird session if it is launched again.  Read the recent 
bugzilla entries about the broken xremote behavior to see why this is a 
challenge.
3) It must not have that ugly lock-file that can get "stuck" after a 
crash or unexpected reboot.
4) It must be able to launch a composer window from both a state where 
thunderbird is not yet running, and thunderbird is already running. 
Again this is a challenge because xremote is broken.

5) https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=109738#c6
It must integrate with the defaults set by the Preferred Applications 
chooser as set by control-center after this patch above.  I aim for this 
patch to eventually go into both upstream control-center and FC2, which 
should make the "Preferred Applications does not work" problem largely 
go away in many applications like htmlview, evolution, and a few others. 
  A few other packages need simple patches for this to behave properly 
though.


I highly suspect that after the above requirements are met, firefox-0.8 
and thunderbird-0.5 will Just Work(TM) together and be nicely integrated 
into the desktop.  After this is ready, I hope to have a nicely 
illustrated guide with graphics explaining the simple installation 
procedure for FC1 and FC2 (just install two RPMS from Extras), set the 
Preferred Applications, and suddenly Linux desktop nirvana.

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=114524
Also note that the above firefox & thunderbird pair will work together, 
while mozilla will be painful with thunderbird without this patch.  I 
really hope for this patch to be applied before FC2, but I promised 
someone that I would never bug him directly about this anymore.  I urge 
others to politely ask him instead. <evil grin>

Below is a list of stuff that I really want to do, but there is no way I 
will have time to do so anytime soon.  I ask for your help as a 
community to resolve.

Delegate to Community
---------------------
* https://bugzilla.fedora.us/show_bug.cgi?id=1167
   fedora-rpmdevtools release
   I am not really sure why they included that "custom" stuff...
   thomasvs mentioned that he had a lot of ideas for kmodhelper
   We really need to get this update released, so please help.
   (Ville is on vacation, so another fedora.us release manager should
   probably roll another candidate package.  <nudge Enrico>)

* mdadm initscript proposal
   I never had the chance to write everything that I wanted to say about 
this.  I have tested many different patches that would be good for a 
generic initscript solution, to be default instead of raidtools.  I am 
sure however that many of you have similar ideas.  Please discuss.

* mailman
   https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=105638
   1) rpm -V failure due to bytecode compiler
   A few other python packages suffer from this problem too, IIRC
   2) issues during uninstall if you have postfix
   Just ugly error messages that could be cleaned up
   3) leftover directories after uninstall (FC1)
   Ownership problems, should be fixed to prevent possible breakage

* metadata DNS txt investigation
Alan Cox had the interesting idea of using the DNS TXT field in order to 
distribute metadata for apt/up2date/yum when we switch to the new 
metadata format.  Using it would be interesting and efficient because of 
DNS automatic propagation and caching.  It could be used to distribute 
an official mirror list, or repository hashes, and since you can have up 
to 65K bytes within DNS TXT, it could easily be GPG signed.  This idea 
while sounding extremely cool could easily be infeasible though, as I 
personally know very little about DNS.

* https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=115218
   Isolate radeon LCD blanking patch
   If anyone cares and wants to give this a try.  No guarantee
   that mharris would accept it into the tree though if the patch
   turns out to be too invasive.

* More KDE keybinding default fixes & unification with Mozilla
   If you care about KDE and Konqueror please continue pushing & 
discussing what I had posted on this list a while ago.  These fixes are 
EASY but someone clueful only has to take the time to test it, get 
opinions and provide exact patches.

* links lockup, kill -9... why?
   Seems to happen only on certain machines but not others...
   extremely annoying and I could never figure out why this happens.

* cpuspeed module detection
   Originally the cpufreq scaling drivers were in rawhide kernels as 
modules, and you had to manually configure /etc/cpuspeed.conf in order 
to make it actually work.  For now Arjan has included those modules into 
recent rawhide kernels, however it would be nice in the long run to 
write proper autodetection for this.  Arjan and Dave Jones want such 
detection to be added to x86info, which already knows about the 
processor, while it would also need to make module decisions based upon 
chipset in some corner cases.  Pretty low priority now that it is 
built-in to the kernel and not very large.

Warren Togami
wtogami at redhat.com