Re: [Kolab-devel] Activity status of Kolab development

On Tue, 09 Jun 2020 06:02:15 +0000 Mike Gabriel <[email protected]> wrote:

> Hi all,
> 
> I have been an observer of the Kolab Development for years and today,  
> I am interested in the development status of the Kolab Groupware.

Most of the questions on the list are questions about kolab status. ;-)

Just kidding, indeed that's a good question I'm asking myself, too.

> How active is the current development? Are there any releases planned  
> for the medium near future? Are features being added? Protocol  
> compliancies updated?

Development has stalled a bit. That doesn't mean there is none, to speak of. For example some annoying bugs were fixed in guam this year - it's quite usable now. 

But, as an example, there's CVE-2020-13964 and CVE-2020-13965. Both were fixed with roundcube 1.4.5 - more than a month ago - and roundcube upstream is on 1.4.6 in the meantime. Quite a large part of roundcube was (and AFAIK still is) done by kolab folks, but kolab is still on version 1.4.4 for now.

Another example: Kolab is ready for Debian 10 for years now. But the install instructions are still referring to Debian 9 and not Debian 10.

I think the community is quite small, by that time. Maybe most of the (ex-)volunteers do have other projects now (and probably still using kolab because it's quite a working solution) 

And KolabSys... I think... well... I didn't heard much over the last while... 

> Reason I ask: other than myself, I have a customer that is interested  
> in Linux Desktop Groupware Clients and as this always goes close  
> together with the backend used, I wondered if Kontact and Kolab is  
> still a viable solution to propose.

Another good question. I do have my opinion. But I don't think the kolab lists are a good place to recommend other solutions. ;-)

regards
hede