html2 VM User's Manual: 21. History and Administration

21. History and Administration

VM was developed by Kyle Jones, starting in early 1989. The first public release of VM was version 4.10, released in June of that year. The original development environment was GNU Emacs 18.52.

The copyright for the code was retained by Kyle Jones. Hence, the package was never included GNU releases, which only contain code copyrighted by the Free Software Foundation. However, Lucid/XEmacs shipped VM starting with version 19.9. The other users obtained VM from the Wonderworks web site, which hosted Kyle Jones’s work. The home page of VM at this site is http://www.wonderworks.com/vm.

The last version released by Kyle Jones was 7.19, in September 2004, which can be found on the Wonderworks web site and its mirror sites.

After this release, Robert Widhopf-Fenk picked up the maintenance of VM, by releasing a series of patches under a separate distribution. He also acquired a number of add-on’s contributed by various developers, including himself, and included them in his distribution. Kyle Jones agreed to hand over the maintenance of VM to Robert Fenk in February, 2007. Further releases were made by Robert Fenk under the 8.0.x series.

All these releases are available from the new project page of VM hosted by Savannah, at the URL http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/viewmail/. According to the project page, “this site exists to continue VM development after version 7.19 as a community project.”

Currently, VM is maintained by a “VM Development Team,” consisting of Robert Widhopf-Fenk, Ulrich M�ller and Uday S Reddy. Other potential members are warmly welcomed. Robert Fenk has been inactive since November, 2008 but he continues to be an official member of the team. The new releases made by the team are numbered 8.1.0 and up.

The project code base is maintained at the Launchpad web site http://launchpad.net/vm. The “VM Development Team” can be reached here using the email address vm@launchpad.net.

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Savannah project site

The changes made in each of the releases is described in the ‘NEWS’ file, which can be found in the source code repository. The changes made in versions up to 7.19 are described in the ‘CHANGES’ file.

The Download link on the Savannah project page, takes you to the downloads area where all the recent releases are available. Under the Source Code menu, the Browse Sources Repository takes you to the source files, which include, among others, the ‘NEWS’ and ‘CHANGES’ files mentioned above.

If you have obtained VM through a secondary distribution that does not include all the sources, you can browse and download the sources from the Source Code menu. The Use Bazaar entry in the menu takes you to a page that lists various version of VM source code, and gives instructions for downloading it via ‘Bazaar’ (bzr).

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Technical support

VM has a dedicated usenet newsgroup gnu.emacs.vm.info in which the developers and the active users participate. This is the first port of call for getting help with VM. The archives of the newsgroup can be found at the Google Groups site http://groups.google.com/group/gnu.emacs.vm.info/topics.

A second newsgroup gnu.emacs.vm.bug is dedicated to discussing bugs or potential bugs in VM. However, this is a place for discussion, not reporting bugs or getting them fixed.

The easiest way to report bugs that need fixing is to use the command M-x vm-submit-bug-report within VM. This prepares an email message by including a state of your VM program which will allow the developers to reproduce your problem. (Potentially sensitive information such as passwords are not included in this state.) Please include a detailed description of the problem and how it arose. The developers may need to ask you for further information or ask you to try alternative approaches to narrow down the problem.

The best way to report bugs is via the Launchpad bug tacker. See below.

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Get Involved

VM is now supported and maintained by the user community. So, as an active user, your participation is key to keep the project going.

Consider registering as a user of the Launchpad development site http://launchpad.net/vm. This allows you to communicate with the developers and other users using a private Launchpad email address. In particular, you can contribute bug reports and participate in the bug report discussions.

You can download the development versions of VM and act as an “alpha” tester. This will allow you to shape the new developments and features and make suggestions that will be valuable to the developers.

To download the development version, identify the “branch” that you would like to download, and use Bazaar version control system with an appropriate Launchpad URL. For example, the command bzr get lp:vm can be used to download the main development branch.

You can also make change to the branch you have downloaded, and submit them to the developers for inclusion in the project. The README file in the distribution explains how to do this. Alternatively, you can create a separate branch in your own space on the Launchpad web site, and submit your changes to that branch. The developers can review and merge your branch with the main development when your changes are ready.

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