Questing for the guide

I was playing some Oblivion while on the phone with a friend, when something came up to my mind, related to my recent idea of an autotools guide . The idea came up in my mind by mixing Oblivion with something that Jürgen was saying this evening.

In the game you can acquire the most important magical items in three ways: you can find them around (rarely), you can build them yourselves (by hunting creatures’ souls), you can pay for them with gold, or you can get them during quests. The latter are usually the most powerful but it’s not always true. At any rate, the “gold” option is rarely the one used because it’s a somewhat scarce resource. You might start to wonder what this has to do with the autotools guide that I’ve made public yesterday, but you might also have already seen where I’m going.

Since I’m the first one to know that money, especially lately, is a scarce resource, and that, me first, I’m the kind of person who’s glad to put in an effort with a market value three/four times more than whatever money I could afford to repay a favour, it would be reasonable for me to provide a way of “payment” through use of technical skills and effort.

So here is my alternative proposal: if you can get me a piece of code that I failed to find and I don’t have time to write, releasing it under a FOSS license (GPLv2+ is very well suggested; compatibility with GPL is very important anyway), and maintaining it until it’s almost “perfect”, I’ll exchange that for a comparable effort in extending the guide.

I’ll post these “quests” from time to time on the blog so you can see them and see whether you think you can complete them; I’ll have to find a way to index them though, for now it’s just a proposal so I don’t think I need to do this right away. But I can drop two ideas if somebody has time and is willing to work on them; both of them relate to IMAP and e-mail messages, so you’ve been warned. I’m also quite picky when it comes to requirements.

The first, is what Jürgen was looking at earlier: I need a way to delete the old messages from some GMail label every day. The idea is that I’d like to use GMail for my mailing lists needs (so I have my messages always with me and so on), but since keeping the whole archive is both pointless (there is gmane, google groups, and the relative archives) and expensive (in term of space used in the GMail IMAP account and of bandwidth needed to sync “All Mail”, via UMTS), I’d like to just always keep the last 3 weeks of e-mail messages. What I need, though, is something slightly more elaborated than just deleting the old messages. It has to be a script that I can run on a cron job locally, and connects to the IMAP server. It has to allow deleting the messages completely from GMail, which means dropping them in the Trash folder (just deleting them is not enough, you just remove the label), and emptying it too; it also has to be configurable on a per-label basis of time to keep the messages (I would empty the label with the release notifications every week rather than every three weeks), and hopefully be able to specify to keep unread messages longer, and consider flagged messages as protected. I don’t care much about implementation language but I’d frown up at things “exotic” like ocaml, smalltalk and similar since it would require me to install their environment. Perl, Python and Ruby all are fine, and Java is too since the thing would run just once a day and is not much of a slowdown to start the JVM for that. No X connection though.

The second is slightly simpler and could be coupled with the one before: I send my database backups from the server to my GMail e-mail address, encrypted with GPG and compressed with BZip2, and then split in message-sized chunks. I need a way to download all the messages and reassemble the backups, once a week, and store it on a flash card, using tar directly on it like it was a tape (no need for a filesystem should reduce the erase count). The email messages have the number of the chunk, the series of the backup (typo or bugzilla) and the date of backup all encoded in the subject. More points if it can do something like Apple’s Time Machine to keep backups each day for a week, each week for a month (or two) and then a backup a month up to two years.

So if somebody has the skill to complete these tasks and would be interested in seeing the guide expanded, well, just go for it!