OSAF Releases Chandler 0.5 PIM [LWN.net]

The Open Source Applications Foundation (OSAF) has announced the release of Chandler 0.5, a GPL-licensed Personal Information Management application (PIM) with an emphasis on shared use. Several years ago, LWN covered the initial release of the project, Chandler 0.1.

[OSAF] The Chandler project vision document explains the project goals of providing a platform for a collaborative cross-platform environment for information management, email, and calendar sharing. The Chandler product roadmap shows that the developers have tamed that vision somewhat, mainly in an effort to get some working code out to the public.

A major lesson learnt from the last two years, is that we took on too much, and had too high an ambition level for the near-term. This "great leap forward" strategy didn't pan out. Instead, we have primarily switched to a "dog food" strategy to quickly develop a first release that is minimally usable, on a day-to-day basis, for us within OSAF and for our info-intensive, techno-savvy early adopters.

The version 0.5 README document details the changes in the current release. Work was mainly focused on calendar software and reliability. The version 0.6 planning (cleaning and polishing) and 0.7 planning (polish email system and add new features) documents show where the next two releases are headed. After version 0.7, Chandler should be stable enough for daily use by early adopters.

One fundamental change in the project has been to move from a peer-to-peer mode of sharing data to the use of Web enabled Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) servers. Email connectivity has been added to Chandler through the Twisted networking framework.

Chandler 0.5 is fairly easy to get running, all one has to do is download the code, unpack it, and run the provided binary. The documentation warns that version 0.5 may only work on machines with the Fedora Core 2 distribution, your author had no trouble running it on Fedora Core 3.

The new release is still experimental, the initial startup screen warns users that the product is under development and should not be trusted to keep user data safe. Nonetheless, Chandler appears to be on-track in the goal of producing a working utility, we look forward to the group's upcoming releases.

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