Evolution 0.99, Release Candidate Out

savaget writes "Evolution 0.99 (Release Candidate 1) is out! "Yes, you read that right: the release candidate for Evolution 1.0 hit the wires this evening. After two years of hard work and more than 700 thousand lines of code written, the sleepless hackers at Ximian are finally getting to the long-awaited 1.0 release of Evolution, the GNOME groupware suite."" One of the most important projects in the open source world today. Best of luck to the monkey boys @ Ximian squashing any last minute arrivals.

Comments

bloat

[SETY]

Does 700,000 lines of code seem a little bloated to anyone else? I guess it is suppose to do everything (kitchen sink included)..........

Re:bloat

[dmelomed]

Yes it does. I've tried Evolution before, and it doesn't even do so much to justify its bloat. Go ahead, mod this "flamebait", I don't care.

If you want to have an open product that's better than Outlook, at least make it leaner and more functional. And what's with the identical look and feel? Can't they spend some time in _better_ than Outlook look and feel design?

Re:bloat

[SnapShot]

Can't they spend some time in _better_ than Outlook look and feel design?
They probably didn't implement the "auto-run trojan worms and VB viruses" funtionality. That may be covered under a MS software patent, however.

Re:bloat

[staili]

Maybe they'll also patent "Software crash" and "Informative blue screen that calms down customers"

Re:bloat

[Hater's Leaving, The]

Maybe, maybe not. It all depends on what 'groupware' is?

I know 'software', 'firmware' and 'hardware', but what is 'groupware'; is that like a beehive, or a termite mound, or something?

Using 'perplexedware',
THL.

Re:bloat

[xanadu-xtroot.com]

700,000 lines of code

How long is a line of code? Are we talking 80 chars, or is this the average of the developers using the pretty Frame Buffer mode at 1024x768?

Seriously. How long is a "line of code"?

Re:bloat

[entrox]

I'd say they have a LineFeed (or was that CarriageReturn? I always forget which one) at the end of each line. Just like the rest of the sane coders on this planet. So one line is from one LF to the other.. Makes sense doesn't it? Otherwise you could just make your window 1 column wide and claim a simple 'Hello World' to be a 100 LOC monster :)

Re:bloat

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong subject, dude.

We're only supposed to complain about bloat like 700,000 lines of code when it's a Microsoft product.

Learn the drill, or we'll have to take away your Slashdot decoder ring.

Re:bloat

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, are they big on whitespace, and whats their prefered OTBS?

For example:
for(int i=0;i

Is considerably less than:

int i;

for(i=0;i>j;i++)
{
printf("%i\t",i);
}

Re:bloat

[Anonymous Coward]

An example of groupware is Outlook. You have email, of course, and you have calendars that you can set up appointments, check to see if there are any conflicts with other peoples' schedules, lists of contacts and business cards, etc.

Re:bloat

[Anonymous Coward]

And what's with the identical look and feel?

There is a rule that Open Source projects are not allowed to implement new design. They have to re-implement, for better or worse, old designs.

That's the reason why Linux is just a tired reimplementation of of Unix circia 1989, for example.

No architects or designers are permitted. If it isn't mentioned in a computer science textbook from the 80's it's not likely it'll appear until someone with money pays a designer.

It's sad but it's the truth. 'Coders' have no imagination.

Re:bloat

[simetra]

Actually, that's with Word-Wrap enabled.
Disabled, it's just 3 really, really long lines.

Re:bloat

[jilles]

700.000 loc is what it takes to write such applications. People sometimes claim there are smaller alternatives but invariably those alternatives are less feature rich.

People have long blamed MS for delivering bloated systems. But it is quite ironic to see that as linux is maturing it is also gaining weight. The hardware requirements for running a full KDE or Gnome desktop are getting awfully close to the hardware requirements of an average MS windows machine. If you consider that MS managed to deliver windows 95 in 1995 on the hardware of that time (pentium/486, 8-16MB) you might actually come to the conclusion they did a better job than Gnome or KDE since in terms of features (not stability of course) it still compares rather well.

No doubt people will reply with references to all sorts of windowmanagers which run rather nice on slow machines claiming they do everything you need. However, they don't fully duplicate the feature set of windows 95 so see above.

Re:bloat

[Cheesy Fool]

Delcaring 'i' in the for loop is only available in the C99 standard so there probably using the latter (although gcc supports declaring 'i' in the for loop as an extension).

Re:bloat

[zentigger]

Actually, I don't know if you ever tried running windows 95 on a 486 with 8MB of RAM, but it was much akin to having your teeth removed with a rusty file. Things took forever to load! Forget the idea of running 800x600 anything higher than 256 colour mode (wow, you have a 1meg video card! ... cool!) and then of course, there were all of the DOS/win16 apps that didn't integrate with the miracles of the system clipboard or OLE.

I think the only thing M$ could be considered to have done right was to put it all in a pretty package so any idiot could install it without having to figure out anything more complicated than how to swap floppy disks and click mouse buttons.

Re:bloat

[Anonymous Coward]

I ran win95 when it was new on a P75, 8 mb ram (it came bundled with win95) - it was dog slow... I had to upgrade ram pretty soon, and still it was alot less snappy than my current system is (PII 300 / 160 ram / TNT2, Debian GNU/Linux sid, kernel 2.4.15-pre1-preempt, KDE 2.2.1 with liquid). This config is really fast for me.

I actually tried running MS Current system (XP) on this box - it was probably even slower than win95 on my P75. Not that it ran full of ram, but the cpu got overloaded all the time when multi-tasking.

Re:bloat

[Anonymous Coward]

wow, that sounds a lot like some of my highschool C++ projects...

Re:bloat

[Anonymous Coward]

Because all operating systems are written by programmers, I assume that any operating system is much smarter than me. Thus, any good operating system should try to outsmart me by restricting my options at every turn. Linux, like all versions of Unix, is lousy at restricting my options because at the command line virtually any operation can be performed with ease. (For example, 'rm -rf /win' could 'delete an entire mounted directory, with no popup window warnings whatsoever.)

I'm proud to say that there is no such danger in XP. Windows pop up when I want to make a change, and then more pop up to ask if I'm sure I want the change. Thankfully, Windows XP's operating system looks after my computer's well-being by occasionally switching configuration settings from the way I want them to what the OS programmers think they might probably ought to be. Boy, I'm just impressed with how smart they are. Once I learned to live with whatever the default settings are on any new hardware I install, I can't say the number of hours I have saved.

I use that spare time to reboot my Windows XP machine multiple times a day. Technical support personnel recommend that I do it regularly-- kind of like brushing my teeth. To help remind me of this necessity, windows pop up to tell me to reboot whenever I make a configuration change. By now my machine is minty fresh, I figure.

There is no such useful rebooting in a Linux system. It is as reliable as the sunrise, with uptimes in weeks and months. Virtually no configuration change requires a reboot, to boot. Imagine all that plaque in the computer. Gross!

In XP I am prevented from making dangerous fundamental configuration changes unless I use a special "registry editor". I have found it so useful to have this separate editor that I hope in future versions they go all the way and supply a separate editor for each file on the disk-- in that way windows could pop up at every keystroke to warn me that changing any line in the file I am editing could cause the system to not run properly. If this were only the case, people would finally learn that it is best to just stick with the mouse and they would be freed of the need to constantly move their hands back to the keyboard. (If one stops to think about it, the mouse is a much better device to use than the keyboard. Ever hear of someone getting carpal tunnel syndrome from a mouse? No. It's comfortable and ergonomic. Like Morse code devices. That's how long distance communication started, after all.)

Linux, by contrast, requires no special editor to change configuration files. The fact that there is no "registry" in Linux allows the abomination of using any text editor whatsoever to do the configuration. Can you believe that configuration files are usually stored clear text? Talk about dangerous!

I am also happy to report that I have experienced no truth to the rumor that Windows disks become corrupt after improper shutdowns. Indeed, I have been forced to improperly shutdown the machine innumerable times after it locks up, and I have no apparent problems to report regarding the disk. No such claim can be made for Linux. They say something about lack of data points. Excuses are all I ever seem to hear from the Linux crowd.

By sheer size alone, Windows XP beats Linux hands down. It is so much bigger, it is _obvious_ that it is better. Why would you want a small OS with the large disks and RAM sizes we have these days? For this reason alone, I heartily recommend Windows as a way to maximize resource utilization. Your CPU and disk will constantly be pegged to the limit, the way god intended. The Linux kernel and drivers accounts for only about 750KB. Why, even the Microsoft Win16 subsystem uses more space than that.

It is no surprise that Windows XP costs $300 on the retail market and Linux doesn't cost anything. People know what they want, and they want Windows XP. Because Linux is free, that means it's basically worthless. The same goes for all the development tools, remotable GUIs, and applications, which all cost money for Windows (i.e., are worth something) and free for Linux (worthless!).

Installing software is very easy in Windows XP. I usually slip in CDs without even reading instructions or warnings, and just double click on whatever window pops up. There is no need to read anything or touch the keyboard. (Did I mention that I hate that thing?) Well, OK, I have learned the hard way the machine locks up if I don't take the time to close all other applications.

Linux, by contrast, requires typing on the keyboard to get anything to install at all. And you always have to know the NAME of program you want to install. For example, in Redhat, you have to type ``rpm -ivh ''to install the program and documentation. Linux needs to get with the 21st century!

Windows XP follows the DOS convention of putting \r\n at the end of every line of a text file. While this is only a mild concern because of the relative rarity of text files on Windows machines these days-- thank god--it helps to differentiate between the text files and the other files. Sadly, Linux makes no distinction between text and other files.

If I legitimately purchase Windows XP, I can call Microsoft customer support to get help with my problems. After a short hold time of an hour or so, they always help me. Ever since I told them that I was dual booting to Linux, they were able to flag my account and now each time I call even the entry level support personnel I am connected to say that Linux is the source of my problems. Everyone seems to agree that Linux is no good. The more I listen, the more I'm impressed with the knowledge of the support staff there.

By contrast, in Linux, all I have is stockpiles of resources and documentation that I would actually have to read in order to understand. Sure, I could obtain Linux support from a commercial organization, but they would probably just tell me I have to use a text editor to fix up my system.

In the end, I have no need for that old computer donkey Unix. I don't need to run big Unix tasks, after all. I refuse to become one of those a bug-eyed computer users, that's for sure. As soon as I can keep Windows XP from crashing for long enough, I'm going to delete my Linux partition, i.e., the equivalent of moving it to the recycle bin, saying that I'm sure, emptying the recycle bin, and again saying that I'm sure.

(ps: whats up with the new slash? sometimes when I open a story comment section, it appears briefly then I am whisked away to one of thier sponsors from the banner ad, without me actually clicking the banner?)

Re:bloat

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously. I suggest you read a book on software metrics which will introduce you to such esoteric concepts as "Non Commenting Source Statements" and "Cyclomatic Complexity Number". Believe it or not, there are actually methods for determining the 'size' and 'complexity' of code.

Re:bloat

[ethereal]

Also, we tend to compare our internal projects on the basis of assembly-equivalent LOC, or AELOC. Otherwise you can't compare across platforms and languages. For reference, we use the ratio 2.5 AELOC (on a Motorola microcontroller, so fairly RISC-like) equals one C LOC. It would be interesting to see if this is a common ratio for development on x86 hardware, and what ratios others are using for other languages.

Re:bloat

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, but it ran fine with 16MB of RAM and the apps of the day (something that wasn't quite true with OS/2 or NT). We rolled it out in 95 to a whole bunch of ThinkPad 755s and 701s (486s and lowend 586s) with no trouble.

And besides the pretty pictures, it was a million times better stability-wise than Win 3.1 (that went back downhill later).

Re:bloat

[jilles]

"Actually, I don't know if you ever tried running windows 95"

Yes I did and I agree it wasn't pretty but it worked and for joe average it was good enough to launch into word 6.0 do his thing. I'd say the state of integration then is what Unix is going through now. You have all these apps which either are commandline based or written for stuff like motif or mwm. You can forget about copying pasting anything more elaborate then ascii to and from such apps. It isn't pretty but you can learn to live with it.

Re:bloat

[fredrik70]

funny, I didn't have too much pain of running win95 on my 486DX66 8MB, was more than bearable, upgraded to 16MB and it went quite alright!
Then I got my first pentium laptop (120MHz) and the thing really flied!! ;-)

Re:bloat

[frank_adrian314159]

Does 700,000 lines of code seem a little bloated to anyone else?

Well, they were writing it in C++. All of those copy constructors and assignment opperators take up a lot of space!

Just think! If they were writing in Lisp with C primitives for accessing X, they probably could have gotten it down to 40 KLoC and been done in half the time...

Re:bloat

[Anonymous Coward]

We should force Miguel to do his development on a P100 with 32mb of ram. I expect optimization would quickly become job 1.

Re:bloat

[IntlHarvester]

Actually, the calendering bit is only an edge case of groupware, and then only when you get into the Invite/Accept/Reschedule bit. Groupware is discussion groups, project tracking applicaitons, document repositories, workflow approval apps, and so on and was around for decades before calendaring got integrated.

A groupware platform like Notes or Outlook enables this stuff by providing a RAD forms environment with an integrated database backend and integrated security and email integration.

The idea is that it's cheaper/easier to build client-server collaborative apps with such a platform than with VB+RDBMS, desktop DBs like Access, or web applications. YMMV. The downside is that hard stuff is harder or impossible and you are tied to the platform.

So, I don't know what exactly makes Evo "groupware" other than it looks like Outlook. Does it even do NNTP?

Re:bloat

[Anonymous Coward]

Sadly I must agree, I've just ditched my 96Mb P200MMX that used to be fine for Gnome 1.2/KDE 2.1, but since upgrading to Ximian Gnome 1.4 with Nautilus, even it's replacement - a 256Mb Duron750 crawls!

I've got K6-2/350's, K6-233's, PIII/500's etc. that seem faster in Win98SE/WinME/Win2KPro than Gnome with Nautilus on the Duron (and yes, I have recompiled my 2.4.13 kernel).

I guess I'm spoiled as I'm used to RISC OS, which even on a 128Mb StrongARM/300 goes like #2 off a shovel!

I may just dump Nautilus - it's lovely to look at, but the news tabs constantly crash and it's just too slow, plus RedCarpet often buggers up software - I had a Mozilla problem until I removed all Mozilla code and re-installed, but I still can no longer access Evolution after 'upgrading', maybe I'll try again tonight as we now have v1.0.....

Re:bloat

[Sir_Real]

I'm pretty sure my CS Prof could code Mozilla in 3 lines of APL...

Re:bloat

[mcspock]

I totally agree. I dont understand how people can hate microsoft, but then write their own ms-lookalike products and think they are somehow better.

If the goal of evolution is just to bring outlook-level functionality to unix people, then cool, it looks like they did a good job. If the goal is to design a superior mail client then this seems to indicate they feel outlook is a superior client?

Re:bloat

[odaiwai]

You know, what Linux (and unix) really needs is not a *clone* of Outlook, but an *alternative* to Outlook. Just look at email. Under *nix, your email is kept in a bunch of text files in a more or less standard location. Just about any email program can be used, from big PINE down to little /bin/mail or whatever takes your fancy. Why isn't there a similar standard for a calendar? Have a .calendar file in ~/, accessible to other users in the style of finger.

i.e. Is billg available for a meeting at 0900on Monday?
$fingercal billg@microsoft.com?date=20011112&time=0900&tz=utc
>fingercal results
>billg is free at the requested time.

dave

Re:bloat

[Anonymous Coward]

Personally, I like to type it out, I tend to write complex code as it is, and I don't want to confuse anyone further by not spacing enough, but there's no need to add too many spaces either.

for(int i = 0; i > j; i++) {
printf("%i\t", i);
}

Allthough, I try from time to time to add a space in front of the operators, I always slip back to not doing it. Bad habit, I guess.

Evolution in the making.

[pyrodex]

Ive been using Evo since .7 days and its come along way and its becoming the outlook of linux (I dont mean to insult Ximian). Its making email in linux closer to becoming something non techinical people can use.

Re:Evolution in the making.

[Cheesy Fool]

Too bad about the rest of the system.

-1, Flamebait

Re:Evolution in the making.

[Anonymous Coward]

actually,
sylpheed/kmail are probably much easier to use for the ordinary user.

evo has features that 99.9% of users don't use.

Re:Evolution in the making.

[Snard]

actually,
sylpheed/kmail are probably much easier to use for the ordinary user.

evo has features that 99.9% of users don't use.

Oh, so that makes it exactly like Outlook then.

Re:Evolution in the making.

[jeff_bond]

Too bad it doesn't display newsgroups like netscape mail or mozilla or outlook express. This means I have to run two apps instead of one, sigh!

Jeff

Re:Evolution in the making.

[archen]

almost. They still have to make it a bigger pain in the ass to deal with, and figure out how to make it more virus friendly.

Re:Evolution in the making.

[fejjie]

what features would these be? According to the user's on the mailing lists, we don't have *enough* features. Go figure.

Full annoucement here

[savaget]

Full annoucement here

cool

[Atrophis]

I hope it good be a replacement for outlook here at work... it would be one more step to getting to all linux insted of windows.

Re:cool

[Cheesy Fool]

AFAIK most people only use Outlook to talk to exchange to use the calender features (and whatever else). So unless Evolution can talk to exchange its not gonna help much getting rid of Windows.

Re:cool

[Lussarn]

Yes, you would probably need to get rid of that exchange server too.

Evolution project homepage is here

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.ximian.com/products/ximian_evolution/

http://www.ximian.com/products/ximian_evolution/

Bloated....?

[eviltypeguy]

700,000 lines is actually pretty small compared to most commercial products these days. And depending on the language it's written in that can vary. Of course it's often been said that most Open Source projects don't have a lot of quality control in the programming department. A lot of strict guidelines are enforced on both coding style and coding documentation where I work.

It is nice to see that the Open Source community can produce something that's every bit as good as Outlook in functionality (I didn't say stability :)...

Re:Bloated....?

[Publicus]

What I've heard is that Ximian has some of the strictest guidelines for code style and quality, which is more than I can say about what I've heard of M$. Also, I don't understand your (I didn't say stability :)) remark. Are you saying Outlook is stable and Evolution is not? I wouldn't say that, as someone who has to use Outlook at work. Half the time it doesn't exit cleanly, but who knows, that could be the crappy OS too.

Ximian's work has influenced my distribution choices in the recent past, because it is so good. Does anyone know if the Ximian Destop works with 'woody'? The Ximian site says potato, but I would imagine it would work with woody. I haven't taken the time to try yet.

Re:Bloated....?

[richw]

They've been promising Woody support RSN for a while but the last I heard it probably wouldn't be supported until Woody becomes stable.

Re:Bloated....?

[the_2nd_coming]

Ximian's work has influenced my distribution choices in the recent past, because it is so good. Does anyone know if the Ximian Destop works with 'woody'? The Ximian site says potato, but I would imagine it would work with woody. I haven't taken the time to try yet

you know what I would like to see, the Ximian desktop included in distrobutions. I don't like Gnome by it seld, but with the ximian desktop complete with set up tools, a soon to be GTK+ open office, evoltion, Nautulis, and Gallion, I could not imagine a better desktop for Linux, it is consistent, powerful, nice looking and set up to be productive.

now, if only they can make symlinking a little more intuitive...............

Re:Bloated....?

[coke machine]

The installer won't work if it detects woody I think, but if you change your /etc/debian_version to 'potato/stable', the installer should start.

Re:Bloated....?

[miguel]

Rob Pike said in his talk on `System Research is Irrelevant' that 90 to 95% of the code in Plan9 was
code to cope with standards and not with new innovative ideas (tcp/ip, http, corba, unicode, posix, mime, pop, imap, x).

A similar scenario happens with Evolution. Modern applications like Evolution are expected to deal with all sorts of IMAP servers, with all sorts of configurations, in a bug compatible fashion and with different "interpretations" of the standard.

Apply this across the board: authentication through SASL (being used more and more and being pretty cool as well), S/SMTP, S/IMAP, IMAP, POP, the various mail formats in Unix you need to import. Then add to the mix decoding MIME message s (both well formed, and ill formed, standard compliant and non-standard compliant), then generating correct Mime code.

Adding code to support features like disconnected IMAP, downloading only the headers, or the whole thing, making it useful over dialup lines.

The calendar tracks the iMIP, iTIP, ICalendar specifications. And can talk to Outlook 2000 and Outlook XP (they dont talk between each other, for calendaring, btw). And the list goes on and on.

HTML mail is supported, correctly forwarding messages is supported (in any combination that you want ;-)

Then add pilot syncing to the mix.

So Evolution is big, because it adapts to the needs of modern users. And it has to cope with the needs of different communities.

Evolution will keep growing to address the needs of more people, and will keep improving. We would of course love to get your contributions to optimize it in every possible way.

Miguel.

Re:Bloated....?

[benjj]

It works with woody, but you have to be prepared for the odd dependency conflict. It does work quite well, but what is woody's GNOME like now? I get the impression that it's quite up to date too?

Re:Bloated....?

[luge]

No, we've never promised woody support RSN. The consistent line since XG 1.4 has been 'we'll support it when it is released as debian stable.'
Luis Villa
Ximian Bugmaster

Re:Bloated....?

[FatRatBastard]

Does anyone know if the Ximian Destop works with 'woody'?

Yes it does (at least so far). Due to the aforementioned memory blowup I took the opportunity to do a fresh install of Debian and upgraded to woody. Some things don't work (like the go-gnome script) but I have gotten Ximian Gnome to install via the appropriate /etc/apt/source.list entry:

deb http://red-carpet.ximian.com/debian stable main

Doing an apt-get install task-ximian-gnome *won't* work though. It pitches a fit about some package it cannot install (sorry, but at my work NT box and can't remember which one makes it puke). BUT, if you already have a vanilla version of gnome on the system and you do an apt-get update && apt-get upgrade it should pull down the Ximian replacements. You may also have to pull down some other Ximian goodies one by one via apt-get install. Evolution works but I have heard Red Carpet doesn't (I haven't tested that... still waiting for replacement memory from Micron). Other than that everything works peachy.

Hope that helps.

Re:Bloated....?

[luge]

Red Carpet will crash instantly on the woody libc if you try that, though the installer might work.

Re:Bloated....?

[Psiren]

I'm writing my own mail application (for various reasons, none of which I'll go into here) and I am aware of the complications of imap et al. Just interpreting the imap rfc is a challenge in itself. Parsing the message structure correctly took me about two weeks. Still, the challenge is one of the reasons for doing it.

Anyway, hope those last few bugs get squashed. Last time I tried it btw, it crashed and burned quite spectacularly. Mines pretty solid, but then it doesn't do anything yet *grin*

Re:Bloated....?

[elefantstn]

I've not had good luck with Woody and Ximian - there are package naming conflicts that can result in an older Ximian package with a higher number not upgrading to a newer Woody package. When libgnomeprint did this to me, it kept a large number of applications from running. My advice is to either use Potato with Ximian or use Sid without. I'm using Sid, and all the Ximian-authored stuff comes through almost immediately, without all the conflicts.

Re:Bloated....?

[richw]

I'm sure what you say is correct.

But until a month or two ago ago the Ximian Desktop download page did say Debian Woody download coming soon.

They probably just meant Woody would be released soon.

Re:Bloated....?

[Junta]

Nautilus is the biggest, most bloated piece of crap file manager I have ever seen. It is unusably slow on a 400MHz machine, even with all the "enhanced graphics" turned off. They have made some optimizations, but not nearly fast enough yet. I have to laugh that they have fam support. Not saying that is a bad thing, it would normally be extremely cool. Nautilus is so slow however, fam becomes pointless. Konqueror is better, but still sluggish. GMC is the only acceptably fast filemanager explicitly for Gnome or KDE, it has speed on par with Windows Explorer (that's not really saying much though...) The filemanager that I use that really shows what is possible is ROX (http://rox.sourceforge.net/). It makes gmc/windows explorer look dreadfully slow, and still remains easy to use for new people, and powerfully configurable for advanced users. It doesn't have support for crap like embedding web browsing or viewing components, but simply does what a file manager should do, manage files, leaving content intepretation to programs better suited for each type.

Re:Bloated....?

[lunatik17]

Does anyone know if the Ximian Destop works with 'woody'?

Yes, it works okay with woody but it's messy. I would recommend installing it under a stock potato install and then dist-upgrade to woody, that works fine. If you already have woody installed... well, prepare to fight it a little. I've had no end of trouble with libgnomeprint.

Re:Bloated....?

[v_thunder]

There is *no* testing done on woody by the Ximian QA dept. If you want to try it and it works for you, great, but please don't submit bug reports unless you are running potato, it just makes it harder on the bugmaster to weed out all the invalid bugs.

Red Carpet is known not to work at all on woody.

Re:Bloated....?

[lunatik17]

Evolution works but I have heard Red Carpet doesn't (I haven't tested that... still waiting for replacement memory from Micron)

Yes, Woody's libc totally breaks red-carpet. But if you're using Woody, apt-get is safer anyway.

Re:Bloated....?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm in the same boat :) I won't be supporting IMAP in the first versions, only SMTP & POP3. However, I know IMAP is more complex than either of these, so who knows.

One of the big letdowns for me was finding a complete lack of any SMTP, POP3 or IMAP libraries that a) Have a clean C API & b) Were not tied specifically to the application they're bundled with. So, I'm writting my own.

Mine doesn't do anything yet either ;)

Re:Bloated....?

[omidk]

Are you kidding? Are you so stuck in the /. MS bashing world that you believe lil' Ximian has a better QA process that microsoft? How long was XP going through release candidates?? 6 months?

Re:Bloated....?

[the_2nd_coming]

well, I think the way nautalis is moving is to become a bonobo dock so things like GMC can be displayed it it. if the only thing that nautalis did was draw the desktop and dock bonobo apps then it should run much faster.

Re:Bloated....?

[ackthpt]

Good stuff, Miguel.

I usually receive my email in text, using a package on Windows called The Bat, because it's simple, reliable (I've regularly got 4000+ messages in my Inbox, 99% spam) and was the first I found off Tucows which performed mail handling to my satisfaction (after spending years with pine, before my Evil ISP took away my shell account.)

To the point. I haven't had a chance to download and trial Ximian, but a spam I recieved, twice, in the past couple days, reminded me of features which would be great for an email manager:

the ability to view only in text, not executing any scripts

the ability to execute, in a debugging/diagnostic mode, what javascript is doing

The latter I performed by saving a suspicious spam to a file and then cleaning it up and nutering it sufficiently to I could see what it was attempting to do. As expected, it unpacked some urls and attempted to open windows.

The beauty of this being an Open Source project, is that there's hope that a feature, rather than completely out of the question in Outlook.

The spam javascript can be viewed here.

Re:Bloated....?

[Ami Ganguli]

I haven't tried any version of XP, but my understanding was that MS did a lot of feature work between the first RC and the final release. So what MS calls a release candidate is what most people call a Beta.

I do think Ximian has a better QA process. Keep in mind that Evolution is only 700k lines of code. They don't need a six month feature freeze to get the product stable. MS, on the other hand, typically releases pre-alpha code as version 1, and only gets to stable release on version three, about six years later.

Re:Bloated....?

[wct]

Well what about this, from the April Ximian Gnome 1.4 announcement?

Supported Platforms
-------------------
(snip)
Support for Debian "Woody," SuSE 7.1, Mandrake 8.0 and Solaris is forthcoming in the next few weeks. Sit tight; we haven't forgotten you.

You can read the full announcement yourself. In the meantime, we've had to do without or change desktop :(

(Sidenote: the lameness filter rejects ... on a line by itself !!! That's just fantastic)

Re:Bloated....?

[Psiren]

So, I'm writting my own.

I'm doing the same. Mines in C++ though, so probably not much use to you ;-)

I would think carefully about imap though. If you are going to include support for it, it might affect the way your app works. Imap is pretty different to anything else, you have to be prepared to accept information from the server at any time, so it may affect the way you choose to code something. I've got imap support in mine now, and it did force me to rethink my approach. Just something for you to consider anyway. Hope it goes well.

Re:Bloated....?

[Karn]

Miguel, thanks for the great software! All the work you guys do for Gnome is really appreciated.

What's up with all these people trashing an email cient which fills an empy niche? They want 100 text-based email clients with minimal features, but scream the minute someone wants to give the community ONE email client with the feature set of Outlook.

I guess some people are just selfish and want more software to be designed their liking, regardless of others who want it.

Thanks again!

Re:Bloated....?

[high]

It is. Im a sid user and I used to use ximians debs but debian was actually faster releasing packages for gnome 1.4 and the packages is now of very high quality.

Re:Bloated....?

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget that XP is a .1 release and is primarily a shell enhancement. All the real work for NT5 went through a 2 year beta period and 2 years of release. (And the Exchange client was in beta for a lot longer than 6 months - I used it - and still took 3 releases to get stable at OL2000.)

Re:Bloated....?

[KagakuNinja]

What I've heard is that Ximian has some of the strictest guidelines for code style and quality, which is more than I can say about what I've heard of M$.

Obviously from someone who knows nothing about MS development. A manager at my former employer was an ex-Power Point developer. He brought over the coding standards and instituted them more or less verbatim; they were quite useful (we dropped most of the hungarian nonsense thankfully).

You might also want to check out some of the books from Microsoft Press. If you can get over you anti-MS bias, that is...

Re:Bloated....?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually this doesn't sound all that hard. Seriously, I'm not trolling. Presumably a lot of code should be reused in shared libraries many of which would not be considered part of this codebase such as the secure sockets stuff. And even though you may deal with different dialects of IMAP servers certainly they have functionality in common. Smtp and pop are trivial. A least common denominator interface of all of these mail services would allow the same mail code to be reused. And what is disconnected IMAP? If you are talking about an "offline" mode that's all in the design and does not really require extra code. You just have a local working set by default. If you're online you run through the data structures marking them expired so the server code is triggered to update the local objects. Of course it's "not that easy" but I don't think it's 700 THOUSAND lines of code!

Now, I could be very wrong and my appologies if I am (I hope I am) but I have seen all too many applications that are just bloated terds that wreek of adolecent procrastinating students who are more concerned with cool looking buttons than functionality being ran by MBA's who know zero about developing software and spend most of there time trying to snow the VCs.

Is it possible that there is a little hand-waveing going on here Miguel? Maybe just a little?

Re:Bloated....?

[fejjie]

maybe you'd like to read the source code and ecide for yourself?

Or, perhaps you are challenging us and would like to prove how good you are by implementing something as good as evolution in fewer lines of code?

I hope you are issuing a challenge :-)

Re:Bloated....?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually I would. But I'm not going to do a CVS checkout of Evolution over 56k. Do you have a new-ish LXR page?

Re:Bloated....?

[fejjie]

http://cvs.gnome.org/ there's a link to bonsai and lxr there.

Re:Bloated....?

[maxpublic]

How could you possibly know how coding is implemented in Windows products? Can you produce *any* source code for *any* of these products so that the rest of us may review them? Or should we rely upon the unsupported, anecdotal evidence of a 'a manager at (your) former employer'?

Heck, I can point you to the source of just about any app you name in Linux, including Linux itself. You can see for yourself whether the coding is sane or not. I don't know of anywhere I can go to do that with Windows or Windows apps. All I can get is unsupported hearsay.

Max

Trial Installs...

[FatRatBastard]

I like Evolution a lot, and its become my e-mail client of choice as of late (well, when my machine's memory isn't going up in smoke that is) but I was wondering if anyone has done any evalutions of Evolution on a large scale basis.

I.e. has anyone in a company been testing to see how well it plays with existing back end infrastructure (Exchange, etc)? How well does it play with others? Which features does it not play with well? Where does it need more work? Ect.

Re:Trial Installs...

[cnkeller]

I.e. has anyone in a company been testing to see how well it plays with existing back end infrastructure (Exchange, etc)?

I've been using evolution for a while now in various configurations. I use the CVS nightlies at work and the RH evolution build by dsainty at home (an older version).

I connect to an exchange server at work via IMAP, my ISP via pop3, and my local box at home by S/IMAP and/or S/POP. All with zero problems. I've played around with sending encrypted and digitally signed mail..again all perfect. I haven't done any PDA stuff, but as an email client, I've found it to be basically flawless.

Re:Trial Installs...

[MasterD]

My company will be rolling out PR1 to all it's employees on Linux and Solaris which is about 90%. We have an Exchange backend (don't ask) and Evolution works great with it. We use IMAP for mail, LDAP for contacts. And the calendering stuff we use Lookout for the web, *but* Evolution can receive the iCal requests and schedule them on a user's local calendar. This is our only complaint -- Evolution cannot see the Exchange calendar backend, thus a manager cannot see the schedules of his/her employees or other colleages.

In our beta tests with a few managers and directors (these guys are not your normal Linux hackers), they have been very pleased. As the new Evolution betas came out, they were psyched to see more functionality and less bugs. Evolution combined with the Crossover plugin, so they can read MS DOC and PPT and XLS attachments is going to save us $500 a seat since we do not need Citrix licenses (except to edit MS formats, which is only about 10% of the time spent in Citrix after our studies). So all in all, Evolution is a great replacement for Lookout. And the Crossover plugin (with Citrix as a backup) allow us to mostly rid ourselves of M$ desktops.

-tduffy

ps. Citrix is a UNIX client that allows you to connect and run a Windows desktop in an X window.

Re:Trial Installs...

[Cheesy Fool]

What about VNC?

Re:Trial Installs...

[iCEBaLM]

ps. Citrix is a UNIX client that allows you to connect and run a Windows desktop in an X window.

How come you don't use VNC for this reason?

-- iCEBaLM

Re:Trial Installs...

[Anonymous Coward]

VNC is _INCREDIBLY_ slow when compared to CITRIX. When I say it's slow I am referring to the responsiveness. Since VNC doesn't use video driver hooks it cannot be as fast as citrix or similar (ie: radmin).

Re:Trial Installs...

[mydigitalself]

Because VNC establishes a screen session with the client whereby Citrix allows you to create a virtual session on the server.

This means that with Citrix you can have 10 people all running MsWord on the same Windows box whereas with VNC its 1:1.

Re:Trial Installs...

[hammock]

Or http://www.rdesktop.org

rdesktop is an open source client for Windows NT Terminal Server and Windows 2000 Terminal Services, capable of natively speaking Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) in order to present the user's NT desktop. Unlike Citrix ICA, no server extensions are required.

Re:Trial Installs...

[Anonymous Coward]

No multiuser support on Windows?

Re:Trial Installs...

[m_ilya]

Last time (a year or maybe even two ago) I tried VNC to connect and run a Windows desktop it sucked a lot.

It was just slow. Very slow. Delays for screen updates were up to two seconds (on 100Mb LAN). I have no idea why but using VNC to run Linux desktop or using other programs (like PcAnywhere) to run Windows desktop is much faster.

Port to Mac OS X?

[CokeBear]

Any plans to port to Mac OS X?
Would instantly have 10 times the potential market...

Re:Port to Mac OS X?

[Anonymous Coward]

Screw MacOS X. Apple doesn't care about Open Source or Linux. Anyway, Microsoft and Apple are in bed together, you can get Outlook for MacOS.

Re:Port to Mac OS X?

[Anonymous Coward]

> Would instantly have 10 times the potential
> market...

You're saying the OS X install base is 10x the Linux install base?! I'd like to see some links for that one!

Re:Port to Mac OS X?

[monkeyserver.com]

score 3 : ignorance

They should port it to mac to waste their time. No, but seriously, I am sure mac users would like having a nice email client, but not even someone with half the IQ of a dead squirel would believe that there is a 10X market for MACs over Linux, there isn't even 1/10 the market for MACs.

Check yourself son.

Re:Port to Mac OS X?

[fizz-beyond]

What interestes me more is if there is any plans to port to any other OS in general? lets think about this for a second... They have an opensource mail client which does almost everything that outlook does (almost being that it cannot connect to MSexchange server through the propriatary MS way). If they ported it to other OS's including Mac OS X, and windows they might be able to steal some of Outlooks userbase. that and well bye bye email viruses...

Re:Port to Mac OS X?

[smurfi]

What's the problem? Install fink, install gnome, compile+install Evolution. It should just work; if not, submit a patch.

Sure the GUIs are completely different. If you don't like that, there's this interesting little (FSVO 'little', andway) project porting GTK+ to Aqua...

Re:Port to Mac OS X?

[bsletten]

It's not even that simple getting it to run on FreeBSD. I've asked several times about FreeBSD support and the answer from Ximian is always, "we'll see".

I too would love to see a Mac OS X port.

Re:Port to Mac OS X?

[Anonymous Coward]

Any plans to port to Mac OS X?

Evolution running on Darwin. I'd say that's just too cool for anyone to pass up! :)

- Graff

Re:Port to Mac OS X?

[xiaix]

Can Outlook and IE for OSX run under linux? :)

Re:Port to Mac OS X?

[Anonymous Coward]

not even someone with half the IQ of a dead squirel would believe that there is a 10X market for MACs over Linux, there isn't even 1/10 the market for MACs.

Let's see: Mac has 5% market, windows 85%, linux 50%.
Apparently, people who can't figure out how to add non-root users to their linux boxes are also bad at math.

Re:Port to Mac OS X?

[toupsie]

Doesnt sound that outrageous. Most Linux installs are servers, not desktops. Most Mac installs are desktops, not servers. A good Outlook Exchange compitable mail client for mac is sorely needed.

Re:Port to Mac OS X?

[Anonymous Coward]

Servers? 14 year olds downloading porn, warez and mp3z while DOS'ing irc channels is what a 'server' is these days?

Re:Port to Mac OS X?

[NavelFozz]

Maybe try porting to other open source systems as well. I would love to try this out, but I am running FreeBSD. I am sure it wouldn't take much to get a *BSD port working.

That will be the day

[Anonymous Coward]

When Gnome is stable...:)

Re:That will be the day

[Anonymous Coward]

Supporting Gnome is like wishing for Rain while standing on the middle of a platform in River whose dam is about to burst

looks

[dciman]

It really is a shame there is such an emphasis on eye candy in the gnome area. I have always found things painfully bogged down at times, even with an up to date video card and drivers. Although I do prefer KDE, my all time favorite is still Blackbox. [blackbox.alug.org] I guess I'm just a minimalist, but I love the speed and responsiveness of this wm.

Re:looks

[GypC]

Apples and oranges. Blackbox is just a window manager, so basically you prefer plain old X without a "Desktop Environment" like those offered by Gnome and KDE.

So do I, but I get tired of explaining the difference, that's left as an exercise for the reader...

Re:looks

[dciman]

Exactly... I don't need all that other crap:) Not having stuff cluttering up my desktop is a plus in my mind. Besides.. we all know emacs is the best email client in the world.... so who needs Evolution? ;-)

Re:looks

[Christianfreak]

I use Blackbox as well. Why do you need a "desktop environment?" I have a nifty menu to access my apps. I can copy and paste between apps. If I really wanted to I could fix the GTK theme to match my BB theme. My desktop is pretty, clean and fast and no less useful. I know that an "average user" would have problems setting things with text files and things, but why not some tools that edit them for you (as separate apps) rather than this whole "desktop environment" thing. I think this trend is to copy Winblows

Re:looks

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, and we all know that chocolate ice cream is better than vanilla, so let's all round up the vanilla eaters and send them to 'the East'.

Already available on Red Carpet.

[Picass0]

I did a Red Carpet update a few days ago and my Evolution now says it's ver .99 release candidate 1. Just to get rid of the "Thank you for using..." nag screen it's worth the upgrade.

Re:Already available on Red Carpet.

[Nadir]

Removing the nag screen has always been possible by setting an environment variable...
I have the following line in my .bash_profile

export EVOLVE_ME_HARDER=ok

Re:Already available on Red Carpet.

[jeffphil]

D*mn-it! Now you tell me about this setting. I had been going into the code and disabling the nag. That got old quick.

For the last month or so it has been popping up in the background, so I have not worried about it too much, though.

Hint: Next time check the mailing lists. Not deja.

long time poster, first time user

[the_rev_matt]

Seriously though, I've been using Evo since the .5 days and have enjoyed watching the advances in stability and feature set. Sure, it's no pine, but it's stable and offers all the functionality I need to convince my wife to try linux instead of winblows (she swears by Eudora and won't use anything else, no matter how much she complains when her Win2k box crashes several times/week).

Re:long time poster, first time user

[Anonymous Coward]

I call bullshit. How many people have a Win2k box crashing even once a week? I'm neither a Windows nor Linux zealot... my Win2k box might not be able to acheive the uptime of my Linux box, but that's probably because a) I use the Windows box for games and b) I use the Linux box primarily as a server. In any event, even though the Win2k box is used by many different people during the day it has yet to see a bluescreen. EZ-CD Creator sometimes bites it, but I can kill that process if I desire, doesn't bring the machine down.

In summation: FUD

Re:long time poster, first time user

[the_rev_matt]

Not every system is the same. If you can't handle the reality that different people have different experiences, that is your problem, not mine.

Re:long time poster, first time user

[Anonymous Coward]

wait til you get a core dump with windows 2000 telling you your usb is fubar..
it cleverly reboots fast so you don't have to spend time looking for the reset button.. unless its too far gone..
but no.. when windows 2000 wants to it will crash and blue screen .. it may not be like a windows 98 blue screen but I've seen it.. its not fabled and it comes up a few times a week.

Re:long time poster, first time user

[be-fan]

Here's a suggestion for you: stop buying hardware that has weird stains on it. Seriously. My machine is all standard (and cheap!) hardware. SBLive!, GeForce2MX, Intel motherboard, etc. Every version of Windows since NT-4 has been rock solid on my machine. Its also a user thing. You have to baby Windows machines a little more, and get used to taking care of them. When I first started on Linux, I could crash it quite regularly, because I was using it wrong. Once you figure out how to use 2K correctly, you shouldn't have any problems.

sure...

[Anonymous Coward]

Come back when you have a real issue to complain about rather than just spewing this garbage out when you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.

Re:sure...

[Anonymous Coward]

"you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about."

Oh, and you do?

Re:sure...

[Anonymous Coward]

What do I get if I give you your balls back, you wop cocksucker?

FTP downloading already /.'ed

[PoiBoy]

Just tried downloading the binaries. The FTP server has too many users.

Re:FTP downloading already /.'ed

[RossyB]

That's not the /. effect. The server has been busy for the last week or so. So as usual, Please Use The Mirrors.

Peeps in the UK can go to (ftp|www).mirror.ac.uk, which has a complete and up-to-date mirror of ftp.ximian.com

Kmail et. al.

[Neil Watson]

How is Evolution different from the combination of Kmail, Korganizer, and Kaddressbook which all integrate with each other so nicely?

Re:Kmail et. al.

[ewilts]

KMail has a barely functional IMAP implementation that can't even tell you how many new messages you've got in each folder without changing to that folder.

The poor IMAP support in KMail is what drove me to Evolution, and I certainly have not regretted it.

Re:Kmail et. al.

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for putting another zealot in his place.

Converting from Kmail?

[bomek]

I tried to export my mail from KMail to evolution but not all emails are there.

Kmail put all mails into different files corresponding to folder in ~/Mail in mbox format. So, i "cat" every files into one big file and i tell evolution it's my mailbox. The problem is, why my file MailingList is empty? In kmail, it's a folder that contains more folders but where the hell are those emails?

-rw------- 1 bomek regulier 0 mar 22 2001 Forums
-rw------- 1 bomek regulier 0 jun 3 03:10 MailingList
-rw------- 1 bomek regulier 6177 nov 8 09:50 Root
-rw------- 1 bomek regulier 4846003 nov 8 09:50 Spam
-rw------- 1 bomek regulier 2212 mar 22 2001 Travail
-rw------- 1 bomek regulier 0 jan 3 2001 drafts
-rw------- 1 bomek regulier 13098043 nov 8 09:50 inbox
-rw------- 1 bomek regulier 0 nov 7 16:21 outbox
-rw------- 1 bomek regulier 11421317 nov 7 16:21 sent-mail
-rw------- 1 bomek regulier 0 nov 7 11:33 trash

Folder Forums and MailingList are both folders that contains more folders. But where are the mails that those folders contains?

Re:Converting from Kmail?

[Clovert Agent]

Kmail put all mails into different files corresponding to folder in ~/Mail in mbox format. So, i "cat" every files into one big file and i tell evolution it's my mailbox.

Why did you do this? Evolution also maintains separate mbox files for each folder. Look in ~/evolution/local/

All you need to do is create directories off ~/evolution/local/[folder] for each mail folder and move the mbox file in there, renaming the file to "mbox" on the way.

In brief, for each mail folder, you want ~/evolution/local/[folder]/mbox

Evolution (IIRC) will create the various control files as required.

Re:Converting from Kmail?

[jacobito]

Why do people insist on posting bug reports to slashdot? If you want your issue to be addressed, there's a proper forum for that.

Re:Converting from Kmail?

[NM156]

I used to have the same problems, because I would try out different email clients every few months. One day I just got fed up with it, and installed imapd. Now I have only one inbox in /var/spool/mail, which I can access with KMail, Mozilla, Pine, Outlook, etc... in a uniform fashion. It's definately the way to go, IMHO.

Huh?

[ankit]

Whats the fuss all about?
Whats wrong with mutt+fetchmail+procmail & slrn?

Re:Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously if people are excited about evolution, a lot.

Re:Huh?

[GypC]

They require literate users and can be used over a ssh session. Obviously the inferior solution is better since it's more like Microsoft's solution

;^P

Re:Huh?

[Russ Steffen]

Whats wrong with mutt+fetchmail+procmail & slrn?

Who the hell needs all that bloat? All you really need is netcat. Or are you trying to say you can't do IMAP over SSL in your head?

As someone who has hated Outlook for a long time..

[Teancom]

I just can't get over the interface. Yes, yes, I know, it's "intuitive" (read: familiar to people who've used Outlook), it's just doesn't match the way I work. As a long-time hater of the KDE 1.x line (ugly, windows-based crap) I never thought there would come the day that I would drop Gnome and/or E in favor of KDE, but that day has come (and gone, I switched over 6 months ago). KMail is the only mail client I've used in linux that approaches Eudora in ease of use *and* features. Ingo, Marc, and Michael have crafted a nice, stable, mail client. Evolution would do well to get to the same level.

That said, GO GNOME! If they can win me back on technical merits, rock on. I've tried evolution a few times in the past, and (like moz) people keep saying "try the latest nightlies! they are *so* much better!". Well, when they do reach 1.0, I'll try them again. Never let it be said I'm not open minded *grin*.

Re:"One of the most important projects..."

[ChrisJC]

It is an important project because a lack of Outlook style software is a major reason that I use NT4 for most of my work, and switch to Linux when I have to, rather than vice versa.

Real question is though, will it work with Exchange servers?, i.e. exchange servers that are using M$ proprietary protocols?

Congrats..

[fault0]

Evolution has become the Emacs of email clients ;-)

(not saying this is a bad thing, but I prefer vi)

Re:Congrats..

[ivan256]

What are you talking about? emacs is the emacs of mail clients :)

Re:Congrats..

[Jason Earl]

Not quite, I personally still prefer Emacs/Gnus to Evolution. Gnus flat slices and dices mail (yes Evolution's got some good stuff too), but more importantly I like editting text in Emacs. After all, there's nothing quite as cool as firing up artist mode for some cool ASCII art in your email (or a quick text based diagram), or being able to actually use your coding Emacs tricks when you send code samples in an email.

And a million other reasons. Besides, once you start down the Emacs trail you will soon find that Emacs does everything. I use it to keep track of appointments and contacts too.

So Evolution isn't quite the Emacs of email clients. Emacs is still the Emacs of email clients. And it even has an excellent vi emulation mode!

Re:Congrats..

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, you mean emacs/vm, not emacs/gnus, right? :-)

Jason is absolutely right. Once you start using emacs seriously, as more than just a code editor, you want to use it for everything.

I never quite figured out what the rage was about vi. I tried it a bit -- it does do some cool stuff. It does out-of-memory editing of very large files, has an interesting UI, and is kinda small.

But vi also isn't nearly as powerful as emacs. Vi is a text editor. Once you use emacs as more than a text editor, you're hooked.

Known issues

[Alien54]

Of course, people following this all along would know this stuff, but I can see lots of people checking it for the first time, etc getting surpised.

So, as noted:

- In this build only, Palm-OS sychronization is temporarily disabled. It will return in the next release.
- Under certain rare circumstances, IMAP connections over SSL can hang Evolution. We expect to have this issue resolved shortly.

Just in case these things are important to you.

Re:Known issues

[Alan]

Two other issues they may or may not have resolved...

1 - Connecting to self signed SSL sites you are prompted EVERY TIME EVOLUTION STARTS about the cert.... can't they just put in a 'don't bug me about this' button?

2 - x509 enc/decrypt/verify support is something linux is sorely missing in a mail client. netscape mail has it, but lets be honest, that sucks ass. evolution has promised this, even had the dialog boxen in, but still nothing on the backend.

Once they fix these, and all the times that it hangs for no reason, oh, and the virtual folder refresh thing

Re:Known issues

[fejjie]

> evolution has promised this, even had the dialog boxen in, but still nothing on the backend.

Being the author of 100% of any written S/MIME code, I can tell you there is/was a lot more code in the backend than there ever was in the front-end ;-)

I'd say that the S/MIME backend code is mostly finished for Evolution, the only thing remaining is turning on the GUI again and writing a certificate manager component. After that, I suspect I have a few bugs in the S/MIME code but I would wager that it should mostly "just work".

We didn't finish it for 1.0 because of time constaints and because Netscape keeps changing the certificate API in libnss.

Re:Known issues

[Alan]

I'm very glad to hear that. I so want to dump netscape you have no idea, and evolution is the nearest thing to being able to do that, so that's very good to hear. Course, it being done for 1.01 would be great too :)

XML-RPC / SOAP

[SnapperHead]

I wonder when / if they will be intrested in working with other projects on an open XML-RPC / SOAP standard for the data access. This way, they could pull there data from a phpGroupWare server, or pull data from any number of projects that support the standards.

There idea would a datastore is IMAP, which makes no sense to me. But, thats how they want to add groupware functionality. I haven't been following the project very close, a few other developers in phpGroupWare have been hounding them.

At any rate, if you would like to see there client work with other open source groupware applications via XML-RPC / SOAP. Start bugging them. :)

Re:XML-RPC / SOAP

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot users never fail to disappoint me with their pathetic use of English.

You, for example, can't even tell the difference between 'there' and 'their'.

The following sentence is also quite a gem.

"There idea would a datastore is IMAP, which makes no sense to me."

You said it!

Re:XML-RPC / SOAP

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a programmer, NOT an English teacher.

Re:XML-RPC / SOAP

[Anonymous Coward]

Shit! I hope you don't code the same way you write!

int eye;

four(eye=0;eye print("I think i'm stuff is missing is?"\t);
}
Hey! He code write good!

Re:XML-RPC / SOAP

[Anonymous Coward]

So you think that only language teachers are supposed to know how to write in their own language? Aren't you ashamed of yourself? You should be.

IANANES (Native English Speaker)

Re:XML-RPC / SOAP

[chaoticapathy]

what makes you think English is their first language?

I bet their English is better than your ability to speak/write their native language.

--
Think twice, post once.

However...

[13013dobbs]

email in linux closer to becoming something non techinical people can use.

when will linux itself be come something that non-technical people can use? Linux is improving on that front, but until it *is* easy for non-technical users to install and use, packages like Evolution, won't make much of a dent.

Re:However...

[Anonymous Coward]

In the real world "something that non-technical people can use" equates to "like Windows" because that is what "non-technical people" in fact use. Two observations:

NOBODY uses Windows because it is easy to use, but because they have no choice. If Linux were (as a practical matter) the only choice, it too would be mistaken for being easy to use.

Much of the difficulty (and techie-orientation) of Linux is in installation and configuration. Once installed and configured properly (with Gnome, KDE, and basic apps) Linux is no harder to use than Windows. The kicker is, non-techies NEVER have to install Windows - it comes from the factory that way. Whenever they do have to worry about configuration (e.g. when adding new hardware), it's just as hard to do as it is in Linux - because you have to understand what's actually going on.

A car wouldn't be considered user-friendly if you had to install the engine and transmission yourself before you could drive - no matter what make and model it is.

Re:However...

[SCHecklerX]

And how many non-technical people do you know who did their own windoze install? Who are the ones who totally hose their systems due to lack of understanding then call you to come fix it for them?

Right.

Give easy to use apps in an already set-up environment, and people will be productive. I've been using Pronto mail, but the development on it has been slow lately and there are some very annoying bugs, so I may give evolution a try.

Re:However...

[13013dobbs]

True, but people like to install things. It is easier for non-techs to install new software on a Windows system. As far as ease of installing new hardware, Windows is easier. It is not perfect, but it is easier.

Re:However...

[13013dobbs]

And how many non-technical people do you know who did their own windoze install? Who are the ones who totally hose their systems due to lack of understanding then call you to come fix it for them?
Several, just about everyone in my family has. Many of my non-tech friends have as well. Out of the dozen or so that I have known to do their own installs, one has totally fubared their system.

Give easy to use apps in an already set-up environment, and people will be productive.
True, but, people like to install new things. Installing a new program in Windows is easier for a non-tech than it is in Linux (or *any* flavor of unix).

Re:However...

[Anonymous Coward]

NOBODY uses Windows because it is easy to use, but because they have no choice.

Bullshit.

I, for one, got tired of living in the Free Software Ghetto, so after a little over a year of only using Linux at home, I formatted the drive on one of my better machines and put Windows 2000 on it.

I conciously chose to do so.

You can sit in your little Jonestown and pretend that isn't a trend if you like, but I see more people all the time willing to admit that Linux sucked for them on the desktop and they abandoned it.

Re:However...

[Anonymous Coward]

Trap non-technical people in an environment that sucks (Linux) and they'll stick with it.

Just like some are with Windows.

As for being productive, well, most people would be more productive if they worked on a Lear-Siegler ADM-3A dumb terminal connnected to a mainframe.

Re:However...

[schon]

when will linux itself be come something that non-technical people can use

Last summer, my step-father, fed up with Windows, asked me what I use on my computers - I told him I use Linux (Slackware) and that I'd be happy to come over and install it, and show him how to use it. In August (without my knowledge), he went out and bought Mandrake 8. He wiped windows from the machine, and installed Mandrake.

He uses his computer every day to chat with friends, surf the web, do email, and maintain his journal. He's VERY non-technical, and had no problems using it at all.

When he used windows, I used to receive at least two "support calls" per month from him. When he installed Mandrake, I got a one call about the UI differences (icons in the "k" menu, instead of on the desktop), but since then, he's had no problems, and I have recieved no calls for support.

Judging from this, I'd say that Linux already is something that non-technical people can use - much more so than Windows.

Re:However...

[GB Kalis]

Where did you come from? I have used many different OSes in my day (DOS, Windows 3.x, Win95/98/NT/2000/XP, NT Server, 2000 Server, and several different releases of Linux, most notably Redhat 5, 6, 6.1, as well as various releases of SUSE and Debian). I am not a non-technical user. Using the car comparision, I not only would be the one to purchase the car without the engine and transmission installed, I purchase it in parts. I have built over 50 different computers. The first time I installed windows on a brand new computer, I'll admit that I didn't know what I was doing, but I looked in the manual, put the boot disk and cd in, and before I knew it I had windows installed and running. The first time I tried to install Linux, first I had to go to the newsgroups to find what I was supposed to do to even get started and then it was still days later before linux was up and operating. Right now, I am running WindowsXP and Windows2000 on my two computers, not because they came installed and I have no choice, but because after using linux, I decided that for now, I much prefer the ease of use of Windows. So, does that make me and everyone else like me NOBODY? Get a clue, your opinion does not represent the opinion of the WHOLE WORLD. (nor does mine, but I never claimed it does)

Re:However...

[Anonymous Coward]

By sheer size alone, Windows XP beats Linux hands down. It is so much bigger, it is _obvious_ that it is better. Why would you want a small OS with the large disks and RAM sizes we have these days? For this reason alone, I heartily recommend Windows as a way to maximize resource utilization. Your CPU and disk will constantly be pegged to the limit, the way god intended. The Linux kernel and drivers accounts for only about 750KB. Why, even the Microsoft Win16 subsystem uses more space than that.

Re:However...

[flez]

Give easy to use apps in an already set-up environment, and people will be productive. I've been using Pronto mail, but the development on it has been slow lately and there are some very annoying bugs, so I may give evolution a try.

Make the apps work before making them easy to use. My GF refuses to use linux because java-script sucks shank, therefore, she can't be productive.

Re:However...

[Anonymous Coward]

My wife has been sharing a linux desktop with me for going on 4 years now. She's so nontechnical that if asked (until recently) she would say our computer OS was netscape.

Same with my three year old, who even though he can't even read yet, can recognize his name on the menu and select one of four "fun things". He even minimizes windows he doesn't want and is starting to get curios about the pager (since sometimes his game disappears and I get it back for him).

Re:However...

[Nau.dk]

I believe that there is a big difference between the install procedure of the first Linux distribution you installed, and the ones of the most current distributions. I believe it's around 4 years ago you installed your first Linux. It's at least around then Redhat 5 was new. A lot has happened since then!

Mandrake 8.x would be a nice example to use. The installation is pretty straight-forward, for non-technical users as well.

Have you tried to install one of the current beginner-friendly distributions? I.E. Redhat Linux 7.2 or Mandrake Linux 8.1?

/Andreas

Re:However...

[chrisvdp74656]

> Installing a new program in Windows is easier for a non-tech than it is in Linux

Eh?

Linux-Mandrake:
$ urpmi a_program (or use rpmdrake - GUI tool)
Debian:
$ apt-get a_program (or whatever Debian's GUI tool is)
Windows:
"Insert the CD-ROM in your CD-ROM drive, and wait for the setup program to appear on your screen. If the setup program does not appear, double-click on "My Computer", locate the icon for your CD-ROM drive and double-click on it, then double-click on the "Setup" application."

And note: all of the above are in the documentation. And the documentation should be read before an installation.

Re:However...

[budgenator]

yeah people like to install things...
Boss "fix my 'puter, the cusors blinks an hour-glass." Get to his house he's got morpheous running full time dumping god only knows what on to the internet, weather-bug updating the weather every 15 seconds and 5 or 6 other trashy shareware/spyware programs running. The system tray streches 90% across an 1280 display and a cable modem with no firewall and no virus protection running! So I throw in a floppy boot of it and format C: and reload.
ME "you backed up your data before you called me didn't you?"
BOSS "no, did you?"
ME "backup would probably have the Virus too(supressed giggle)"
well after that the 'puter was responsive again, at least for a while. I guess that goes to show you easy to install isn't always a good feature, at least in Widows ME(that was a typo but now I think it appropriate).

And as for hardware almost invariably Linux just picks it up, except for some whacko winmodems and windows only sound cards, most of which don't work on my windows machine either. The rest that do work on my Linux machine about half don't work in Windows 95A P90 machine.

Some people shouldn't be allowed to breed and they especialy shouldn't be allowed to install software on their computers. Often in Windows the difference between a virus and a program is that the virus is self-installing, but the program requires the user to specificaly engage in self-destructive behaviour.

Look out, Notes and Exchange

[Anonymous Coward]

This is exactly actually what Linux needs to compete with Microsoft. Accenture, McKinsey and Hewitt all use Notes - if groupware is effective, the user might not care OS is running underneath.

Yeah, I like BlackBox and emacs myself. But a lot of people prefer the GUI goodness.

Re:Look out, Notes and Exchange

[Anonymous Coward]

This is exactly actually what Linux needs to compete with Microsoft.

People have used this exact sentence with reference to at least a dozen projects...and guess what? Microsoft desktop market share holds firm.

Accenture, McKinsey and Hewitt all use Notes

Too bad for them. Notes is an absolutely dreadful product and I truly pity people who are forced to use it. Yes, forced, no one would use that load of crap left to their own devices.

Re:Look out, Notes and Exchange

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember going into CompUSA a few years ago back when I went there far too often. There was always a Lotus Notes client box on the shelf. It grew more and more shopworn every time I went in the store.

I always wondered who would buy such a thing at CompUSA....

Re:Look out, Notes and Exchange

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure they were waiting for the moment when General Motors realized that they only ordered 99,999 Notes licences and were one short and had to make a quick trip to the CompUSA.

Re:As someone who has hated Outlook for a long tim

[Fnkmaster]

Hmm, I've found Evolution to be far more stable and usable than KMail. In particular, Evolution's IMAP support is superb. KMail, despite claims to the contrary, does not seem to be happy with large IMAP folders at all, and I have watched it crash and burn once or twice, but it was really the extremely slow startup time while rechecking the entirety of my large IMAP folders. It's just too damned slow on startup. I have used it just fine with POP in the past though, I just think it has a ways to go on the back end support before it is as good as Evolution.

it would be great

[sehryan]

but i don't use linux at home, and neither does my job. this, along with the other ximian products look great, but i can't use them. and forcing the department of commerce to switch to linux isn't a viable option. the linux people tend to complain about all the windows software that they can't use on linux...well, now they have an opportunity to be the better people, and make something that is completely cross platform...linux, windows, mac. it would be a shame if this opportunity was passed up out of spite.

but does it depend?

[layyze]

I used Evolution for my mail on the systems where I run Redhat 7.0 and 7.1. The problem is that on my personal machines, I run Slackware 8.0. I love Slackware and there is no way that I'll switch just for a mail client. Has anyone had much success getting around the Ximian library dependency issues? Slackware can install RPM's in its own package format and there are extension's for .TGZ's package manager to include dependencies.
Anyway, My point is that Evolution like most of Ximian's stuff needs too many weird library dependencies (which is why I try not to use Ximian GNOME anywhere). I have tried to compile it using all of the requested RPM's and I have tried installing it and all of the requested libraries from source, but with no avail. Will there ever be a way to install it cross-distro like Mozilla or StarOffice's binary install? I think that this ability would help Evolution gain more ground in the Unix world.

...and don't forget...

[kerskine]

Best of luck to the monkey boys @ Ximian

Let's not forget the Monkey Girls as well!!

Re:...and don't forget...

[NineNine]

Girls can code? If this is true, we need a full /. article reporting it. I'm not aware of any female coders.

Re:...and don't forget...

[Anonymous Coward]

i'm not aware of any girls being able to do anything other than be 'homeworkers'.

oooooh.

Re:...and don't forget...

[Anonymous Coward]

Who suck the developer's dicks.

Re:...and don't forget...

[Karn]

It must suck for you to not have a woman..

Re:"One of the most important projects..."

[tmark]

Linux is and has always been a server OS and I find it rather amusing that a simple pretty GUI email application is being crowned as "One of the most important projects in the open source world today"

It is amusing. Many die-hard Linux advocates claim that the fact that MS still holds the desktop for the foreseeable future is irrelevant. Yet the way projects like this are being touted whenever there is some progress made suggests inconsistency. As with most chauvinisms, particular points are relevant only to the extent that one's own biases are being advanced.

Evolve my CellMail

[Anonymous Coward]

Evolution is pretty nice. But my only quandry is this:

when mailing my friends' cell phones, KMail provides no added MIME headers, whereas evolution litters their screens with routing verbosity.

where do we go from here?

Re:Evolve my CellMail

[fejjie]

uh, routing headers have nothing to do with Evolution and *everything* to do with sendmail

Evolution doesn't put a single routing header in any message it sends, so don't blame evolution.

FTP is /.'d , get source at my mirror

[atheos]

here, get the source here.

anonymous login
ftp.atheosonline.com/ximian/

Re:As someone who has hated Outlook for a long tim

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah, but for the majority of us who use POP3>

kmail is less bloated than evo
kmail is nicely seperated from other apps
kmail has a nicer interface (imho, don't like outlook/windowish interface)

bugs

[Thng]

Best of luck to the monkey boys @ Ximian squashing any last minute arrivals.

I assume Taco means bugs. Hasn't he ever been to a zoo? monkeys don't squash bugs... they pick them off each other and eat them. I bet that'd be a weird room to be in...

Re:bugs

[luge]

At one point, I considered having my business cards say 'Chief Monkey Groomer' for just that reason :)

Re:bugs

[Anonymous Coward]

The extra protien makes for healthy monkies.

32MB to install Evolution.

[Anonymous Coward]

skye:~# apt-get install evolution
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
bonobo-conf libbonobo-conf0 libgnome-pilot1
The following NEW packages will be installed:
bonobo-conf evolution libbonobo-conf0 libgnome-pilot1
0 packages upgraded, 4 newly installed, 0 to remove and 4 not upgraded.
Need to get 8667kB of archives. After unpacking 31.9MB will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n]
Does anybody but me rather want to use Sylpheed with its 600K binary rather than 32MB?

Added to that, I've never been able to make Evolution even read my email box without crashing. When will it be 64 bit clean?

Re:32MB to install Evolution.

[entrox]

Comparing the total size with dependencies, graphics, sounds etc. of evolution to the size of the binary of sylpheed isn't exactly correct..

Re:32MB to install Evolution.

[Karn]

You're using an email client?

What a waste of disk space!

You should be using vi to read your mail, and you can telnet to your mail server to send replies. It'll make you feel like a real hacker, and then you can tell people who use pine and mutt that their email client is bloated!

Re:32MB to install Evolution.

[Anonymous Coward]

vi? Fuck that visual shit and just use 'mail' on your TTY.

Re:32MB to install Evolution.

[Anonymous Coward]

wow, evolution is actually smaller than sylpheed if the sylpheed binary is 600k:

[root@localhost root]# ls -l /usr/bin/evolution
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 300164 /usr/bin/evolution

300k 600k ;-)

(okay, so I strip --strip-all'd the evolution binary before doing an ls)

No more Outlook jealousy!

[Anonymous Coward]

Now linux users can have an absurdly bloated email reader too!

Flogged

[MindStalker]

I know I'll get flogged for this. But, is there any chance of running this in win32?

Re:Flogged

[PhotoGuy]

Cygwin/XFree86 looks pretty cool.

A shame one can't use it to port a commercial app without going open source with that app (as I understand its license). That kind of restricts it's utility for commercial projects. I think it's this kind of licensing which is slowing down the adoption of non-Microsoft stuff commercially, which is key to conquering the Microsoft monopoly.

-me

Evolution Availability Caveat

[sharkey]

Last minute update:

Evolution (any release) not permitted on computers owned or operated by schools or students in the State of Kansas.

Re:Evolution Availability Caveat

[Sonicboom]

Next think you know William Jennigs Bryan IV will come out of the woodwork charging that Evolution is a crime against God, America, and violates the Digitial Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA).

Oh where is Clarence Darrow when you need him?

I wonder if they're allowed to play Monkey Island in Kansas???

Re:Evolution Availability Caveat

[sharkey]

Next think you know William Jennigs Bryan IV will come out of the woodwork charging that Evolution is a crime against God, America, and violates the Digitial Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA).

If he claims that homosexuals use it, Falwell and Donahue will leap to his support before his lips stop moving.

Re:Evolution Availability Caveat

[Anonymous Coward]

Your good

you can turn a strawman into a joke.

Re:Evolution Availability Caveat

[wowbagger]

Sorry, that was last millenium. This millenium, evolution is allowed in Kansas, and piss-poor settlements between convicted monopolists and incompetent federal agencies are not.

Go Carla, Go Carla, Go Carla (Stovall, that is...)

pop3 or imap

[kel-tor]

what is the difference between these two exactly, like are each better for somethings?

Re:pop3 or imap

[BrerBear]

Pop3 is more popular, but IMAP is more useful when you are accessing your mail from multiple places because it keeps the mail and state on the server. For instance, read half your new mail from one machine, leave, log in from another machine later, and your inbox will look just like it did when you left off (+ new messages).
IMAP is very nice for reading your same email from home and work without "leave new messages on server" setting hacks and the like.

Re:pop3 or imap

[MindStalker]

Ok, BIG difference. With Pop3 you simply download the email into a local folder. With IMAP the emails stay on the server and you are browsing folders remotly. A goot IMAP client with make local copies of the mail also, so that you don't have to redownload everytime you want to look at a piece of mail. Think Webmail, without the web :)

Re:pop3 or imap

[timbck2]

Here's a good description of IMAP vs. POP3:

IMAP vs. POP (www.imap.org)

Re:pop3 or imap

[Jon Peterson]

pop3 is a _very_ simple protocol that allows mail to be read, retrieved, or deleted from a server by a client. It's a had a few features added in later days, and might support simple management like password changing, but that's about it.

The main weakness of pop3 is that it treats the server end as a dumb, unorganised list of messages, and expects all cleverness (mailboxes, sorting, filtering, etc) to be done client side. This means it is a pain to change clients, and nearly impossible to manage one mail account from two clients (e.g. one at home, one at work).

The main strength of pop3 is that it works.

IMAP is a protocol that allows a client to manipulate a server side data store. All the useful information (what messages are read, which folders they are in etc) is on the server, so if you change IMAP clients, all the data is just read of the server, and away you go.

However, AFAIK IMAP is a rather complex protocol. I have never come across a client that implements it very well, all of them struggle with large numbers of messages, handling of attachments and so on. In addition, it's still possible for a client to implement client-side only add-on features that are then incompatibile with other IMAP clients.

Outlook is the only client I've used that seems to handle server-centric email well, and it probably does with in proprietary extensions. Of course Outlook's handling of SMTP is rather dire, but hey.

Re:pop3 or imap

[irix]

I have an IMAP email box at my current place of employment, and I had never used it before coming here.

If I can help it I will never go back to POP. I read the same email box using Outlook 2K on NT, pine on Solaris, Kmail and Evolution my Linux boxen at home, Netscape Messenger on my SGI and Pocket Outlook on my iPaq.

If more ISPs offered IMAP and people knew the advantages they wouldn't touch POP with a 100ft pole.

Re:pop3 or imap

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, "Leave mail on server" with POP3 isn't a hack. You just don't do a DELE after you've done the RETR for each message is all. POP3 requires you to specifically delete the message seperatly.

Although yeah, POP3 doesn't have the funkier features of IMAP :)

Re:pop3 or imap

[howardjeremy]

If more ISPs offered IMAP and people knew the advantages they wouldn't touch POP with a 100ft pole

You don't need your ISP to support IMAP. You can sign up with an IMAP provider, such as one listed here.

Re:"One of the most important projects..."

[Enzondio]

On the website it says that its calendar is compatible with Exchange, but I doubt the actual E-mail portion would be (unless you just treat the Exchange server as a POP3 server). Anyway, there seemed to be very little detail on how it would actually interact in an Exchange environment.

Mirror

[FrostedWheat]

The main FTP is having a slashdot moment, for now here is a nice mirror:

ftp://sunsite.cnlab-switch.ch/mirror/ximian/

If this one starts slowing down there are always others - use the good 'ol google.com.

This is a very timely release

[Anton Anatopopov]

Considering where microsoft's nebulous '.net' marketing strategy is at the moment, Ximinan and the gnome developers have a real shot at taking over the e-commerce middleware standards crown.

Question is, does it play well with windows. What is the interoperability going to be like ? I heard Microsoft were going to make parts of .net free software. Will these microsoft code snippets find their way into the Gnome code base ?

Re:This is a very timely release

[sg_oneill]

Not good yet. I seriously considered implementing Evolution as a Outlook replacement (thus removing the final barrier to bouncing windows outa the offices, but alas, it can't do exchange calendaring. Fix that windoze goes. Until then, it can't play proplerly with exchange therefore not so good in many windows shops.

Bummer really.

Working with Exchange?

[update()]

I've tried Evolution and it works nicely, although I prefer a Eudora/KMail style interface for my own use.

What I'm confused about is to what degree it does or doesn't work with Exchange. It's such an obvious Outlook clone and the web site brags about how it "works alongside messaging systems such as Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes." so I was hoping my wife could use it to replace the web interface to Exchange on her Solaris workstation. (It's not so bad when you have IE available, but it's clunky with Konqueror and awful in Communicator or Mozilla.)

It seems, though, that Evolution supports vCard and the calendar standard (forget its name) but the Exchange mail support is limited to IMAP and POP. Is that right or am I missing something?

By the way, for the people squabbling about Evolution vs KMail -- they're different things. I prefer the lighter interface without features I don't need but it's an apple and orange comparison.

Re:Working with Exchange?

[Anonymous Coward]

It works just fine with Exchange if the Exchange server is configured to use IMAP. I have successfully used it with the Exchange server at work (and I consequently owe the Evolution team some beer). Evolution does not (yet) support MAPI.

Re:Working with Exchange?

[Anonymous Coward]

no it doesn't not work with exchange, other than via smtp, and pop3/imap. if your exchange administrators don't turn on those services, you still have to use outlook on a windows system.

Re:Working with Exchange?

[Anonymous Coward]

nor ever will support mapi.

Re:Working with Exchange?

[Ewan]

Exchange uses a proprietary protocol called MAPI to connect to Outlook, and uses IMAP, POP3, and LDAP to connect to other email clients.

Evolution supports IMAP for the email side of things very well, and LDAP for shared address books, but if your wife makes use of Outlook's calendar system then it won't be so simple to switch.

It is also possible that your Exchange administrator has turned off the IMAP support on the Exchange server, in which case you have no chance at all im afraid.

Check out http://lists.ximian.com/archives/public/evolution- hackers/2000-August/000360.html for some more information, though while that thread seems quite positive, I have not heard of any movement since then.

Ewan

Farewell to the Unix design philosophy

[Ars-Fartsica]

More and more these days, linux projects are rejecting the canons of classic unix design - keep it small, keep it simple, sensibly limit the tasks solved by the code, integrate well with other utilities using simple interfaces.

Following these rules does not mean using mutt on the console - you can enjoy a GUI experience without creating bloatware. KMail is a great example of this - it reads and sends mail with a simple interface that does not attempt to solve an integrated problem.

Unfortunately so many linux projects have become so obsessed with attracting Windows users (why? Do we really expect these people to switch over? Get real!) that linux environments are becoming as fractured as Windows.

Re:Farewell to the Unix design philosophy

[Syberghost]

Unfortunately so many linux projects have become so obsessed with attracting Windows users (why? Do we really expect these people to switch over? Get real!)

It isn't about inducing Windows home users to switch over; it's about convincing management that they don't have to inflict Windows on us at work.

Re:Farewell to the Unix design philosophy

[Ian Pointer]

But doesn't Evolution use a 'wombat' back-end, which could be used by other programs?

Re:Farewell to the Unix design philosophy

[Anonymous Coward]

Do we really expect these people to switch over?

I did.

Anyway... I understand your point (knowing more about Unix history now than I did then), but the question is where do you draw the line? less was much more than more many ages back, which in turn was much more than cat. Should they have not made it because it did more than solve an extremely simple problem? pine can send emails but also has an address book. That's a lot more than the mail command can do for you. Is that too much integration? Don't get me started on Emacs. So Evolution gives you mail, an address book, and a calendar (and the Summary page, aka My Evolution, but we'll ignore that for the purposes of this discussion). One could easily argue that a calendar needs to be with your email (suits will anyway - that's how they plan their lives - get an email, add the meeting discussed in the email to their calendar, set an alarm for it, then when it's almost time for their meeting and they're sitting there reading dirty joke emails from their buddies, the alarm kicks off and away they go to their meeting).

What it comes down to is are you talking about a "simple task" from the perspective of a human or a computer? That was rhetorical, you were talking about a computer. The problem is computers weren't invented for the benefit of other computers. Computers were invented for the benefit of humans. The purpose of modern software design is to make using this extremely complex piece of science and technology easier for the masses who don't understand what resistors and capacitors are or what their bearing is on how the machine works. They just want it to do "things" - human "things" like send an email, not computer "things" like pipe the contents of that file to stdout. That is what Evolution is for. And I like it.

End treatise.

Re:Farewell to the Unix design philosophy

[carm$y$]

[...] you can enjoy a GUI experience without creating bloatware.

Yea, Evolution is good and helpful for gnome in general... the way it helped the dinosaurs some time ago. :)

Re:Farewell to the Unix design philosophy

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree the mass transition to the linux desktop will never happen. As has been proven by everything failing that has to do with desktop linux, there is just no market for it. And mark me as a troll, but Ximian will be gone within a year, I'd bet my life on it.

Re:Farewell to the Unix design philosophy

[Isldeur]

You know, my first thought when I read this was "Hey, it's a freeakin email-groupware-ogranizer program". It can't be small.

And then I thought. Oh. Yes. That was pretty funny of me. Those are a little bit different.... Not having used evolution for all that much but looking at it every now and then (I _do_ user kmail as my primary email program though), I can't comment. But I don't think anyone tries to hide the fact that they're trying to duplicate Outlook. And I wonder if anyone stepped back long enough to think "Is this a good idea?"

Heck, as far as a I know (And I could be really wrong here) it's not even like it loads modules or something like that. It's just one massive 700,000 line program.

Re:Farewell to the Unix design philosophy

[Skeezix]

Yes, there are plenty of gui mail clients that keep it simple, etc. But if you want a fully integrated groupware suite, where are you going to turn? Evolution isn't just about attracting Windows users. It's about giving current Linux users something they've been wanting for a long time. An integrated suite that just works. Evolution is a pleasure to use. I agree with Taco, this is one of the most important open source projects out there. KMail, and other simple mail clients do not fill the needs of many users or the needs of many corporate environments. Evolution is making steps in the right direction.

Re:Farewell to the Unix design philosophy

[gouldtj]

Actually I would say that in many ways that Evolution embraces these philosophies. 'Evolution' is really no more than a collection of utilities, all tied together. If you run Evolution you'll notice that there are about three or four different applications running tied into one shell. So while you might think of Evolution as 'one application' in reality it is not - it is a shell to use little applications that happen to be developed by the same developers (not all, but many).

I know that these guys are big Bonobo fans, and I am too. What that creates is a return of the Unix design philosophy to the GUI. Small applications can be embedded to create larger applications. Look at GnuCash: you could say that all the really needed is a ledger to manage data. In someways that would be true. But then they attached it to Guppi, and, now you can graph your data too! Think of it like a pipe that is much easier to use :)

Re:Farewell to the Unix design philosophy

[Malic]

Unlike Windows, however, Linux hasn't lost that "pieces/parts" mentality. It just has more on top of it. I think you are being a bit harsh.

As for the Linux community developing to attract Windows users, I think the truth is this: We all have used Windows at one time or another and there are some things we actually like about it. We just don't like the way it was done, the direction it's going and the direction it came from.

So we have an itch to scratch and - wha-la - Evolution 1.0.

Re:Farewell to the Unix design philosophy

[tswinzig]

Unfortunately so many linux projects have become so obsessed with attracting Windows users

Maybe they're not trying to attract Windows users. Maybe they would like programs as sophisticated as Outlook?

Just because YOU like the design philosophy of Unix doesn't mean everyone that uses Linux must like (or adhere) to that philosophy.

If you don't like it, don't use it. But obviously there is a DESIRE for this type of program in the Linux world, or it wouldn't have been created.

Re:Farewell to the Unix design philosophy

[styopa]

That was one of the Unix design philosophies. There was a point where the design philosophy was to include as many things as they could into one program, ie sendmail.

Frankly, Evolution is a really nice program. Since 0.15 I have had no problems with it, not with Tasks or mail or anything, it just works. It crashed once on me with 0.15, but 0.16 hasn't crashed at all on me.

Linux needs a group ware suite. Linux needs integration between components. Why, because it makes life easier for the user. Just as Konquerer has integrated web browsing with a graphical shell, what Nautilus is trying to do, or integrating compatibilities between the different aspects of office suite software. Some things need to be meshed because it makes sense.

Re:Farewell to the Unix design philosophy

[YellowBook]

More and more these days, linux projects are rejecting the canons of classic unix design - keep it small, keep it simple, sensibly limit the tasks solved by the code, integrate well with other utilities using simple interfaces.

Actually, I think Evolution, Nautilus, and other newer Gnome apps really represent a revitalization of the Unix philosophy. If you take a look at Evolution, you'll see that all of its different functions are bonobo components. The same with the various views in Nautilus. They can be re-used by other applications.

I've been really impressed by what's been done in Gnome with bonobo lately. For example, Galeon can use GTM as a download handler, getting all sorts of nice features (pause and resume downloads, e.g.) for free. Also, Galeon itself has been componentized, and Nautilus can now use Galeon for handling text/html documents. All this componentization means that each component can focus on one task and do it well, and applications can consist primarily of code to glue together components. This should sound familiar to anyone used to using shell scripts on Unix.

Re:Farewell to the Unix design philosophy

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it's amusing that one of the best examples of solving a large problem with many small components in the unix fashion is KDE, the project most ridiculed as windows-like.

Re:Farewell to the Unix design philosophy

[Wdomburg]

>Heck, as far as a I know (And I could be really
>wrong here) it's not even like it loads modules
>or something like that. It's just one massive
>700,000 line program.

You're really wrong. Aside from being a mail and groupware client, Evolution has also been one of the primary testbeds for Bonobo.

The actual program itself is just a shell that loads components to do all the dirty work:

/usr/bin/evolution
/usr/bin/evolution-addressbook
/usr/bin/evolution-addressbook-clean
/usr/bin/evolution-addressbook-export
/usr/bin/evolution-addressbook-import
/usr/bin/evolution-alarm-notify
/usr/bin/evolution-calendar
/usr/bin/evolution-calendar-importer
/usr/bin/evolution-elm-importer
/usr/bin/evolution-executive-summary
/usr/bin/evolution-gnomecard-importer
/usr/bin/evolution-ldif-importer
/usr/bin/evolution-mail
/usr/bin/evolution-move-tasks
/usr/bin/evolution-netscape-importer
/usr/bin/evolution-pine-importer
/usr/bin/evolution-vcard-importer

Re:Farewell to the Unix design philosophy

[cduffy]

Not really -- this would be true, but Evolution's design is tightly compartmentalized. Let me pose a question to you: If an application uses a system such as Bonobo rather than the traditional pipes and such to integrate separate components into a single unified whole, does this really make it any less integrated than those using the traditional (pipe-based) approach? Certainly, it makes for a more tightly integrated look-and-feel, which may lead to charges of bloatware by those not knowing that the object model is working under the covers; the actual design needs to be considered, though, before that charge can be said to have any substance.

Re:Farewell to the Unix design philosophy

[biostatman]

Your point is well taken about the beauty of the UNIX philosophy. The beauty of it, I think, is best expressed in relation to the piping textual output from one command to another.

I use my Palm pilot alot. Before, I would use J-Pilot (an excellent application, btw) + Netscape/Mozilla mail application. Both applications did their job admirably, but there was no advantage whatsoever to having the email functionality separated from the calendar/contact functionality.

Aside from "attracting windows users" evolution actually fills a void - the integration of these disparate information sources is very useful (and if they maintain the rate of improvement - it should be quite a reliable program, it is already gained leaps and bounds in stability). If, in the future, server hooks could be put in there, that would be even better. For various reasons (competitive, moral, security, etc..., but NOT b/c I didn't like the features) I stopped using Outlook over 2 years ago. Now that I have the integration of Palm Info + Email again, I'm hooked.

Re:Farewell to the Unix design philosophy

[Anonymous Coward]

I dunno -- I always thought that Windows had the pieces/parts bit down on the GUI level much better than Unix ever did.

For example, you can make your Outlook Inbox view appear in the middle of a IE webpage (say as part of a internal portal). Can you do that with evolution and mozilla? kmail? My guess is no, because all of those programs use non-interoperable parts.

Re:Farewell to the Unix design philosophy

[DevNull Ogre]

Your point about perspective is a very good one. Something that interface designers should always be aware of. Most people just want to do "human" things without worrying about the underlying mechanism. This is in no way incompatible with the Unix philosphy.

Suppose Evolution split its calender and email (and whatever else it does) features into seperate smaller, efficient programs. Programs that "do one thing and do it well". Evolution Mail, Evolution Calendar, Evolution Addressbook, and so on could still totally interface with each other using, e.g., Unix pipes.

The advantage of such an arrangement, however, is that the interfaces are then exposed to the rest of the world. I love using Mutt for email. But I also like being able to quickly add an appointment to my calendar based on an email. And it's always handy to have a good address book. If things were done the Unix way, I could choose my mail user agent from a broad selection of software, match that with a calendar I like, and whatever addressbook suits me best.

Evolution could still ship with defaults set to using Evolution Mail, Evolution Addressbook, and Evolution Calendar. People who are happy with that wouldn't need to know or care how they are integrated. But those of us who want to dig a bit deeper will be able to mix and match our programs by simply telling it to launch something else whenever I want to use calendars or mail. Perhaps best of all, people who are new to Unix will be able to dig deeper and learn and grow to love the Unix philosophy.

Re:Farewell to the Unix design philosophy

[Panaflex]

Apparently you've never read or even touched evolution.

Suppose Evolution split its calender and email (and whatever else it does) features into seperate smaller, efficient programs. Programs that "do one thing and do it well". Evolution Mail, Evolution Calendar, Evolution Addressbook, and so on could still totally interface with each other using, e.g., Unix pipes.

Evolution IS made up of many smaller programs that communicate through CORBA. I'm not sure how "splitable" they are, but from my work on the calendaring component, it's not impossible. (I've been working on Calendar printing).

Pan

Re:Farewell to the Unix design philosophy

[led]

yes, and in the early days of evolution I could fell that sometimes parts of the program would crash but others would continue to run perfectly, thus a bug would not spread to the whole program.

Re:Farewell to the Unix design philosophy

[Sloppy]

Do we really expect these people to switch over? Get real!

That is exactly what the purpose of this program is.

You're worried about Linux environments being fractured? Well, you're right: it's fractured. But that's exactly because the Linux population was already fractured about what they want. Some people want a good OS, some want a Windows replacement. Those camps are never going to see eye-to-eye. Just be grateful that they share certain sub-goals.

Re:Farewell to the Unix design philosophy

[root_42]

Following these rules does not mean using mutt on the console - you can enjoy a GUI experience without creating bloatware. KMail is a great example of this - it reads and sends mail with a simple interface that does not attempt to solve an integrated problem.

Well, KMail is definitely more complex (in space and time complexity) than for example Pine, but the whole KDE2 architecture still is quite UNIXish. KMail uses the kio_smtp, kio_pop3 and kio_imap4 IO-Slaves. So if one wants to improve the IMAP performance of KMail he only has to improve the according KIO-Slave. After all it's Open-Source -- isn't it?

Re:Farewell to the Unix design philosophy

[einhverfr]

Good points. One should note that more and more the emphasis is on total solutions and that means integration on some level.

I would also argue that the workstation is a completely different beast than the server. On the server, you want everything to be simple and reliable because fewer things will go wrong and those that do can be fixed more easily (my big complaint with NT Server is that it is too complex). However, on the workstation, you want people to be able to be productive and this means complex integration.

However integration can be over done... Try this one. Set Microsoft Outlook never to dial the internet and set Interent Explorer to dialwhenever a connection is not present. Now send an html email to yourself which contains an img tag referencing a www site. Try to read it off-line. Watch Outlook apparently disregard your settings and dial the internet... OK. So it is really internet explorer, but try explaining that one to your older relatives...

My point is that a balance must be struck. Re-using code and components by integrating them is all well and good especially on the workstation, but it requires some thought as to how preferences, etc. are handled so that problems can be resolved...

Re:Farewell to the Unix design philosophy

[einhverfr]

Yea, Evolution is good and helpful for gnome in general... the way it helped the dinosaurs some time ago. :)

Yep. They took to the skies. Where do you think that birds came from?

Actually, I think that evolution IS good for gnome as well as for Linux in general.

Re:Farewell to the Unix design philosophy

[DunbarTheInept]

I agree that using a tool with minimalist functionality is a good thing, but when it comes to an e-mail client, I consider IMAP support to BE minimally necessary functionality, and kmail doesn't have it.

So kmail doesn't even achieve minimal functionality for me. (It is useless in an environment where I sometimes access mail from home and sometimes from work and sometimes from a friend's house and sometimes on the road.)

Unfortunately it seems like nobody is making a minimalist client that has IMAP support. All the clients that do IMAP are also gigantic bloatware with functionality unrelated to mail. That means I have to put up with the bloat, like it or not.

Re:Farewell to the Unix design philosophy

[DunbarTheInept]

The advantage pipes have is that they have an ad-hoc CLI component. You can use the components in your own scripts easily. As far as I know, with CORBA you end up having to write a lot of app in order to just get "hello world" types of things going. Not that that's inherently wrong, but it does remove the ability to do quick ad-hoc glueing of modules together in a simple script. Someone who is used to being able to do that would be missing that familiar feature.

CORBA is more powerful, but less able to do ad-hoc things.

Re:Farewell to the Unix design philosophy

[cduffy]

I grant you that what you allege is true -- but it is (and should be addressed as) an issue with insufficiently expressive programming languages, as opposed to a fault in OLE, Bonobo and friends.

More expressive languages such as Python make it easier to meet that minimum standard (some good Java CORBA bindings exist also), and hopefully future ones will continue the trend.

Re:Farewell to the Unix design philosophy

[Anonymous Coward]

You're right!

Unix has a GREAT history of fantastic GUI applications.
Right...

Cheers

Andy

p.s. I must admit, i used to LOVE exmh, as unintuitive and ugly as it was. It had a nice "feel" and was powerful.

Re:Farewell to the Unix design philosophy

[DevNull Ogre]

I suspected Evolution was done with CORBA--most Gnome programs follow that design philosophy. It's great in terms of reuse. If I want to make a program that uses a calendar, I can just use what has already been implemented for Evolution.

But that's not really what I was getting at with my comment. As far as I can tell, the CORBA interface isn't sufficiently user-level.

I'm looking for programs that communicate through simple, reasonably well-defined interfaces. I want the ability to (as a user) specify "helper" programs. I'd like to be able to tell my mail reader what calendar program to use and how to pass it that information. Then, if I receive something that my mail reader recognizes as a meeting invitation, it give to my calendar program to add to my schedule. Likewise, I should be able to tell my calendar program how to get email addresses from my addressbook for people who are listed as attendees and then load my mail user agent to send them a message. In a similar way, it would be nice if my addressbook knew how to open my MUA for mailing.

Obviously, Evolution's components all know how to do these things--but only with (correct me if I'm wrong here) Evolution's other components. I should be able to pick and choose my components. Maybe Mutt for email, Evolution's Calendar for scheduling, and something else (as a side note, what are some good addressbooks?) for contacts.

As a user, it should be realtively easy for me to tell each program how to talk to the other. For this to be possible, programs need to be written with simple interfaces and designed to be scriptable (so that things can be done on a command-line). E.g., I should be able to type something like:

addressbook --email --name "John Smith"

And have it send:

johnsmith@someisp.net

to stdout. Some other addressbook might have different switches, but as long as I can get them both to send one line with an email address to stdout, they can both be easily plugged into my mail and calendar programs.

For examples, Mutt implements this design philosophy very well and MH takes it to the extreme.

I recognize that configuring these programs can be a real pain. Getting a usable Mutt setup is an adventure. But it doesn't always have to be that way. Evolution could ship as a collection of programs preconfigured to use eachother. Then only those who cared to make changes would have to worry about things like command-line syntax and such.

Finally, I'm not totally stuck on Unix pipes as the only acceptable form of multi-process communication. I'm sure CORBA has its advantages. But I should be able to set things up like I described without recompiling or writing my own software.

Re:Farewell to the Unix design philosophy

[ncc74656]

Following these rules does not mean using mutt on the console

<offtopic>
You say that like there's something wrong with that idea. Mutt rocks!
</offtopic>

Re:Farewell to the Unix design philosophy

[fejjie]

I'd also like to point out that imap, mbox, pop, smtp, maildir, mh, etc are all run-time loadable modules.

Re:Farewell to the Unix design philosophy

[fejjie]

Actually, Evolution is made up of a bunch of small reusable parts.

Now, while you couldn't embed an Evolution Inbox inside Mozilla, you *could* embed it in say Nautilus :-)

Re:Farewell to the Unix design philosophy

[Anonymous Coward]

KMail has had IMAP support for many months. The lastest release version has perfectly usable IMAP. Frequently requested improvements not in the release version (eg. persistant cache for faster startup) have been implemented in the current development version.

Re:Farewell to the Unix design philosophy

[maxpublic]

Unfortunately so many linux projects have become so obsessed with attracting Windows users (why? Do we really expect these people to switch over? Get real!)

Actually, I'm seeing people try out Linux for the first time because of the Windows XP registration scheme (among other things). It isn't Linux that moves these people to try it out, but Microsoft.

Providing tools that 'mimic' common Windows programs just makes it all the easier. KDE is so close that I've had people mistake it for another version of Windows!

Max

Re:Farewell to the Unix design philosophy

[Panaflex]

This is very do-able in evolution as well. I suspect that few of the components are set up for this, but all the components have an IDL (Interface Description) which should be easily callable.

I don't think CORBA precludes the ability to do any of what you want - it would just take some work on your part interface it.

Pan

notes

[kel-tor]

My work uses notes for it's client (running through vmware, tho i understand it's reletively easy to run through wine). I've been hoping for IBM to get off its arse and release linux builds for the client, designer, and admin (not just the domino server), but as yet...

So, im curious if evolution can interface at all with a domino mail server and esp the group calendaring part.

compatibility with Outlook

[zigzag]

Wouldn't it be great if the DOJ/Microsoft settlement forced MS to publish info about how to interface to Outlook? Evolution as an Outlook client and StarOffice compatibility with MS Word would open the floodgates.

Re:compatibility with Outlook

[Anonymous Coward]

Bynari knows how to interface with Outlook.

Re:compatibility with Outlook

[Anonymous Coward]

According to some rumors I've heard MS can't exactly release the "standard" - they don't really have a written standard to go by. Due to a variety of things none of the "standard" formats used by MS Word over the years is fully documented - they just have to recycle the code and pray it works.

Re:compatibility with Outlook

[sg_oneill]

Amen. Exchange support is really the only thing left, but unadressed, there will be a lot of places that could never go the penguin.

Nothing is wrong with your setup

[Anonymous Coward]

In fact your setup fits in far better with the unix philosophy than a monolithic app like Evolution.

Don't fret, I expect Evolution support to be a mile wide and an inch thick - come back in a year and take a poll to see how many people are using it - I suspect the number will be low.

Re:Nothing is wrong with your setup

[RossyB]

Ermm... what?

My mail setup is remote POP3 server -> fetchmail -> maildrop (~procmail) -> exim -> courier -> evolution.

Is this not the unix philosophy? I have tool for each stage of the process, the only difference here is I use Evolution, you use mutt. Dig deal.

Re:Nothing is wrong with your setup

[fejjie]

I guess your definition of monolithic is a bunch of small applications that work together and that load run-time loadable modules when they are needed?

I think you need to go out and buy a dictionary before you make yourself look like a fool again ;-)

What kind of use is possible under KDE

[MdeG]

The (admittedly limited) commitment I have made to using linux as a desktop has been with KDE. However, Evolution is probably the most important app for me to increase my commitment. Do I have to switch to Gnome?

What do I lose out on if I use Evolution under KDE?

Thanks

Matthew

Re:What kind of use is possible under KDE

[JabXVI]

It should work perfectly under KDE, or any window manager. You just need to have all of the libraries Evolution requires installed (which includes the GNOME libraries).

Re:What kind of use is possible under KDE

[chetohevia]

It does work perfectly well under KDE. Lots of people do this, actually. One of the things we're working on now is making sure that apps we make can be used with a lot of different configurations-- so you could run Evolution with KDE, blackbox, whatever.

Re:As someone who has hated Outlook for a long tim

[SCHecklerX]

you might want to give pronto mail a try:

http://www.muhri.net/pronto

I recommend using MySQL as a backend for speed. The CSV stuff is slow when you have a lot of messages.

Groupware?

[hey!]

Is this really groupware, or just a nice e-mail client?

Groupware should help people collaborate. For example, Lotus Notes has e-mail, calendar, sure, but it is primarily a general purpose platform for building applications that require managing documents as they move from person to person. E-mail is just another application built on the platform.

Calling exchange groupware is kind of an exaggeration, and the attempts to create exchange-like open source "groupware" I've seen have been pale imitations of a pale imitation.

Honestly, though, if this had just had a decent free shared group calendar it would be a big step forward.

Re:Groupware?

[aspillai]

Actually, Exchange does have group ware capabilities. Lotus Notes is a full blown Workflow engine. Exchange is not. That's the main difference.

Re:Groupware?

[afidel]

actually most of the security holes in exchange/outlook are there to make groupware possible. Autoexecute of attachments, VBScript support, ActiveX controlls and the tight ingegration with the Office Suite are there so that a few large clients could build large verticle document management and groupware projects on top of the exchange platform. Of cours these features end up hurting the other 99% of MS's clients that use the combination, or heck even just outlook. But for M$ these large clients orders are big enough that they made an inherintly insecure system. Security, Flexibility, Scalability, take 2.

Re:Groupware?

[IntlHarvester]

Good point -- Notes was "groupware" long before it had a calendar or even a functioning e-mail client (anyone use R3!?)

Personally, I don't think that Exchange/Outlook isn't a very good model to follow because of it's lack of customizability. Once you get past the few built-in tricks, that's it. Looks good though.

Re:Groupware?

[Anonymous Coward]

MS should look at how Lotus solved those problems: All code is signed and admins and users can control the access rights of client-side scripts. The default config would keep any Notes-based virus from migrating outside the org.

Re:"One of the most important projects..."

[YetAnotherDave]

If they've got IMAP right, it'll work

I use mutt with the exchange server at work, and it's just fine. Having calendaring compatability would be a major selling point for the higher-ups, tho...

Slow.

[Anonymous Coward]

> expr 700000 / 730
958

A line of code

[BorgDrone]

Seriously. How long is a "line of code"?

A line of code is the text between 2 newline's

Re:As someone who has hated Outlook for a long tim

[spellcheckur]

This is the beauty of having a variety of software products to choose from.

If kmail does the job for you, beautiful! Use kmail.

Competing packages, like kmail and evolution (to the extent that they 'compete') are good for the linux community. Different environments ensure that more users find the functionality they're looking for.

I always find it troubling the seemingly militant conflicts between hard core KDE users and the pro-Gnome users. Both seem to think there's only one real solution to the desktop "problem," but a loss of either would be a significant blow to the Linux community.

As for the people who say that linux is a "server" OS, and that we should abandon the desktop battle, consider what losing the (admittedly small) group of people who use linux for a primary user OS means... a larger user base and development of desktop apps inherently means more attention to your OS, and more resources into making the server aspect better. If Linux goes server-only, there will be considerably fewer resources sunk into developing the OS as a whole.

FreeSBD

[Anonymous Coward]

Last 3 times I have tried Evolution in FreeBSD, is dies. Hangs on startup and stops responding.

Lets hope that the 1.0 release of Evolution works with all the Gnome target builds, which includes FreeBSD.

Re:FreeSBD

[cnkeller]

Last 3 times I have tried Evolution in FreeBSD, is dies. Hangs on startup and stops responding.

Point taken, I should have said I was running on RH Linux 7.1 & 7.2.

Re:FreeSBD

[Karn]

What's this FreeSBD you speak off?

I though all silent-but-deadlies were free.

NFS locking fixed?

[jeff_bond]

I looked through the change log, and found no mention of the NFS locking bug that you get when your home directory is an NFS mount (which is of course, a common setup on a company network).

Does anyone know if this is fixed? It's such a basic problem that I can't believe it's been in there since version 0.8 or something. It wouldn't be so bad if evolution allowed you to specify where to put your mail store, but no, it doesn't.

I bet this single problem alone prevents very many people from using it.

Jeff

Re:NFS locking fixed?

[Karn]

Actually, I have been using Evo for 4 or so months, and I have never had an NFS issue.

My client is RH7.X, and my server is as well.

Re:NFS locking fixed?

[Anonymous Coward]

Talk to your sysadmin. Tell him to learn how to admin an NFS server.

Why is this rated 5?

[Brad Moore]

I browse Slashdot at level 5 so I can avoid posts like this person's mindless testimonial. Why is this on the same level as a post from the lead developer of Evolution? *sigh*

Re:Why is this rated 5?

[Teancom]

I have no clue. I didn't expect to get modd'ed to *3*, let alone 5. I guess you just can't out-guess the moderators....

Exchange support supposedly in the pipeline

[Anonymous Coward]

From what I hear Ximian is working on "middleware" that will enable Evolution to use FreeBusy on Exchange and basically have full Outlook functionality in Evolution. Whether that will pan out we'll see.

Need for Ximian

[luugi]

I would really like to try the software but I hate the fact that you need to have Ximian and Red Carpet. I'm behind a firewall. And it doesn't let me use Red Carpet. I understand that you don't need Ximian desktop but when I tried downloading Evolution I needed a bunch other files.

I wish there was one big rpm or tarball I would need to download. And when I'm done with the software I just need to uninstall Evolution.

I use Windows Maker and I don't want install Ximian for an email app.

Re:Need for Ximian

[Anonymous Coward]

> I'm behind a firewall. And it doesn't let me use
>Red Carpet.

So how do you access the web then??

red-carpet has a proxy setting.

Mirrors?

[Manes]

Any mirrors out there?

I can't seem to find a list of mirrors on the ximian pages, and the main ftp is offcourse totally busy :)

Not quite so simple

[JimRay]

Evolution requires a LOT of libraries that haven't been ported to OSX, via Fink or otherwise (to my knowledge). Things like Bonobo, etc. From what I understand, this is more than a trivial recompile to get these kinds of utilites over.

Re:Not quite so simple

[kongtomorrow]

Bonobo in particular *has* been ported to OSX and is available through Fink (http://fink.sourceforge.net/).

I don't know anything else specific to Evolution on the mac. I do know that there are in general problems porting KDE apps to OSX. Says the Fink FAQ (http://fink.sourceforge.net/faq/usage-fink.php#kd e):

Q: Why are there no packages for KDE?

A: Because there simply are none.

Seriously, KDE has (or at least had) serious problems that prevent a port to Mac OS X. It assumes it can do things with shared libraries that are only possible on ELF systems like Linux, *BSD and Solaris. It could very well be that some people are trying to port it nevertheless, but we haven't heard of any breakthroughs yet. Note that Qt is a different story, we have a package for it and it works fine.

Re:Not quite so simple

[Anonymous Coward]

I've actually been trying to get Evolution to run on my OS X 10.1 machine, and I've made some progress. Actually, the maintainer of the GNOME stuff for Fink has made progress -- I just whine when I need a new library to get evolution to compile.

I _was_ working with evolution 0.16, and the GNOME maintainer, Masonori Sekino, helpfully updated all the necessary libraries in the unstable Fink branch for me, but it still wouldn't compile due to some library or archive problem. I can't remember which. Anyway, the new version of Evolution is going to require a lot more libraries to be updated.

Re:As someone who has hated Outlook for a long tim

[Prop]

I recommend using MySQL as a backend for speed.

aaargh.... not to flame or anything, but having to run an SQL database for an email client is just ... insane. (Incidently, that goes double for MP3 players! There's a few of those on freshmeat...)

How to get rid of that screen (in any version)

[Anonymous Coward]

set your evironment variable $EVOLVE_ME_HARDER=1

No, I'm not kidding, it really works.

KDE vs. Gnome and its efforts

[CogiNerd]

I'm not to new to the game of migration, considering my official title is "Integrator" here at work. So, my opinion on the new Gnome stuff is rather well received, to say the least.

But, if I may, I would like to make a rather obvious observation. Does it seem that the Ximian group is doing what KDE'ers have been doing all along?

What I mean by that, is the "Windows" look and feel intended for migration for current M$ users?

I'm not slamming them for making stuff LOOK like M$ stuff, but more along the lines of a rather obvious change that seems to be going on, since the early days of gnome.

KDE programmers from the 50,000 foot view on my end have ALWAYS intended for the look and feel to be comfortible for the Windows user to migrate or USE Linux + KDE fairly easily. Again, I'm NOT trying to slam either group. I love both of them.

I really love Evolution, and its definately a viable solution to the security related stuff going on with my Outlook and Office products (which its like the cocaine habit I just can't kill, btw :)

I will start using Evolution for email and integration with my current stuff, to try and fit in like I'm not a M$ user, but what can I say? I have to come out of the closest and admit that I am using Microsoft products at some point right?

Good job Ximian! I like the stuff you guys are doing!

Re:KDE vs. Gnome and its efforts

[snoozerdss]

No offence to you or anyone else but the thing that always gets me is that people want a "windows look and feel".......well then, why not just use windows? It's like saying I want a pepsi that looks and tastes like Coke ;) It just doesn't always make sense to me. There are many useable gui tools for linux that are not 'windows" like and alot of them work better than the "windows look and feel" programs. Is it me or are most (not all) windows look and feel programs just as bloated as the windows counter part?

Re:KDE vs. Gnome and its efforts

[BSemrad]

To a certain extent that is true but that's not all there is to it. Windows has some good aspects to it, at least W2K does anyway. Many people are relatively happy with the look and feel of Windows but HATE the way Microsoft is constantly trying to strong arm them in one way or another. For example, MS is always trying to force users away from competing products by making sure that compatibility with others only happens when it helps MS lockin.

Re:KDE vs. Gnome and its efforts

[Tukla]

the thing that always gets me is that people want a "windows look and feel".......well then, why not just use windows?

I suppose a person can like the Windows UI without liking one or more of these:

1) The frequent crashes.

2) The increasingly exorbitant cost.

3) MS's monopolistic business practices.

It's like saying I want a pepsi that looks and tastes like Coke

I think of it instead as someone saying, "I want a Coke that looks and tastes like Coke but isn't loaded with sugar and caffeine."

Re:KDE vs. Gnome and its efforts

[Rhone]

well then, why not just use windows? It's like saying I want a pepsi that looks and tastes like Coke ;)

While I don't disagree with your overall point (that Linux programs shouldn't aim to look just like Windows programs), I don't agree with that particular analogy. It assumes that the look and feel is the only thing important about the system--what about stability, security, price, software license issues (e.g. GPL vs. proprietary), etc.? Wanting to use Linux with a Windows look and feel is not the same as wanting to use Windows, because look and feel is not the only trait people are basing their decisions on.

If you want to use a Pepsi and Coke analogy, it would be more analogous to say that people want Pepsi, with the taste of Pepsi, but packaged in a can that is the same size and shape of a Coke can, and opens the same way as a Coke can. That way, they can get the slightly-sweeter taste of Pepsi without having to deal with learning how to use a different can (not that that would be difficult, but hey, it's just an analogy :) ).

That said though, I personally have little desire to use programs that look exactly like Windows. And I don't have trouble figuring out how to use new types of drink containers, either. ;)

Re:KDE vs. Gnome and its efforts

[damiam]

Why on earth would you want Coke without caffeine?

Shouldn't be hard

[cperciva]

FreeBSD already has Evolution in its ports tree, and in the past people have found that FreeBSD ports have worked fine under OS X (probably since OS X is based on FreeBSD).

It's the Pearl Harbor soon again!

[Anonymous Coward]

The Japanese are coming!!

Sylpheed

[snoozerdss]

Try sylpheed for an email client. It's small fast reliable and the gui is easy to use.

Yes you can build & run GNOME under Windows.

[Sleepy]

Yes, you could build and run Evolution under Windows, but currently ONLY under Cygwin + an X11 server (this is still local on the Windows box). A Cygwin setup can be accomplished by a newbie. See links below for running GNOME under Cygwin on a Windows box.

Much of GNOME will not build natively, although the libraries themselves are designed to be portable, and GTK is working just fine as Win32 (see GIMP).

There are two kinds of Windows ports... X11 display based, and true "native" Win32. The former is easy to do; the latter is not yet possible (tho you can help!). It's likely that a "native GNOME for Windows" will be much easier, once GTK 2.0 is released.

Links regarding running GNOME or compiling under a local X11 display:
http://news.gnome.org/976323862/index_html
http://xfree86.cygwin.com/screenshots/
http://www.geocities.co.jp/SiliconValley/1596/en/c ygwin.html

From the GNOME FAQ, regarding native GNOME for M$ Windows:
http://canvas.gnome.org:65348/gnomefaq/html/x359.h tml

A lot of people want to port GNOME and GTK apps over to Windows. To conquer the enemy they say, you have to enter their territory, then sway them to your culture (OS). ;-)

32MB to install Evolution with debugging symbols

[luge]

Without symbols, I'm told the main binary package is around 6 or 7 MB. This is still bigger than sylpheed, sure, but it also does calendaring, tasks, and addresbook stuff. So... take your pic.

Not so quick...

[FallLine]

score 3 : ignorance
They should port it to mac to waste their time. No, but seriously, I am sure mac users would like having a nice email client, but not even someone with half the IQ of a dead squirel would believe that there is a 10X market for MACs over Linux, there isn't even 1/10 the market for MACs.

Check yourself son.

Prove it. Linux _might_ have a larger installed base, but even those statistics do not say that it is overtaking Macintosh as a desktop OS. In fact, there are many reasons to believe this is untrue.

1) Linux is, and has certainly, been focused as a server OS. Most of those official statistics may be pure server installations.

2) Even those that use Linux as a desktop may be using it for the novelty/coolness/geek factor, rather than for productivity.

3) Many of the statistics are based on numbers of downloads and other measures, hardly proof that it's really being used.

4) Linux lacks a lot of the quality software that users demand. Thus I find it hard to believe that most people can get away with, never mind prefer, using Linux in lieu of Windows or Macintosh.

5) If Linux's desktop marketshare is so small, why are so few commercial companies porting their desktop software to Linux?

6) There are actually official statistics from IDC and others that show Linux is still a notch or two below Macintosh as a "client" (read desktop) OS. [I don't think they tell the whole picture though...in regards to my other comments]

FYI, I'm a Linux/*Nix/Windows user, not Mac and I have more than half an IQ of a live squirel even. Imagine that!

Re:Not so quick...

[jonabbey]

<anecdotal>

Our laboratory started off heavily invested in Macintoshes, but over the last decade the numbers of Macs have greatly declined. Most of that decline is in favor of desktops running some flavor of Windows, of course, but looking at our database, it looks like Macs and Linux systems in the lab are just about at a dead heat. A number of those Linux systems are actually YellowDog Linux running on Apple hardware, even.

Walking around the lab, I see lots and lots of Gnome or KDE or WindowMaker desktops. Seems like all the k00l k1dz coming in want their own Linux desktops.

I would even go so far as to claim that it is more likely that a new machine coming into the laboratory will be a Linux system than that it would be a Macintosh, now. I know my division hasn't bought a Mac in the last 3 years, but we have several people with Linux desktops.

The lab certainly has far more people running Linux desktops than we do running MacOS X desktops today.

</anecdotal>

The ideal situation, as far as our lab is concerned for something like Evolution, would be if we could get it on Windows and Mac as well as Linux/UNIX.. being able to standardize on something other than Outlook would be a blessing from heaven for us. From what I understand of the ways of GTK, I imagine that it's more likely that we might see a Win32 port of Evolution than a MacOS [8,9] version. We do have enough Macs around that that's a real consideration, but the Mac users are used to having to run oddball software anyway.

Re:Not so quick...

[soellman]

well I have to point out that this is a lab.. really not at all indicative of the computer-using populace at large. And I wouldn't be surprised if in the next couple years you see more macs being purchased or brought in by the 'kool kidz' once everyone realizes that you can run your molecular modelling X-windows software as well as your office/internet explorer on the same box using osx!

and from a technical standpoint, the port of Evolution to macosx would probably be MUCH easier than to win32. I'm sure it's almost there if you count using an Xserver on the mac, but even if you rewrite the front-end to cocoa/carbon/wxwindows/whatever the core is still on a unix-derivative.. the preferred compiler on osx is gcc :)

Re:Not so quick...

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is that as soon as there are many non-Outlook clients, MS can just alter Exchange to be incompatible and revoke your license for the old version. No, they couldn't change IMAP much, but things like calendaring could be easily broken.

Re:Not so quick...

[maxpublic]

Yet another FUDmeister who insists that Linux doesn't have "a lot of the quality software that users demand".

Listen up, boy: that line has been done, and done, and done again. It may have been true three or four years ago but it ain't true anymore. Buy yourself a clue or two.

Now, you just might get your dander up and start naming off a few esoteric Win programs that don't have a ready equivalent in Linux, but 99% of the app-time in Windows is devoted to:

• email
• word processing
• spreadsheets
• web browsing
• calendars
• farting around on the job

Linux has a great many apps that can do all of these things, thus satisfying the huge majority of those who actually work at their computers (or avoid working at their computers). Users don't demand anything more than this, because most users aren't employed in jobs that need anything more complicated. If you think otherwise you need to get out more.

So, FUD-guy, think up a new line. Yours is old, outdated, and simply not true anymore. Worse, it's boring. If you're going to slag Linux at least choose something that might actually be true.

Max

Re:Not so quick...

[FallLine]

Yet another FUDmeister who insists that Linux doesn't have "a lot of the quality software that users demand".

Uhuh, FUD that gets +5 in a generally pro-Linux crowd.

Listen up, boy: that line has been done, and done, and done again. It may have been true three or four years ago but it ain't true anymore. Buy yourself a clue or two.

Boy, eh? Look in the mirror.

Linux's software may not be quite as bad as it used to be, but it still is far below the state of Macintosh even. The level of moderation suggests that most people here agree with my sentiments. What's more consumers are not exactly flooding Linux en masse.

email

Which email client is *widely known* to be equal to Eudora or Outlook?

word processing

Staroffice and OpenOffice are sort of OK, but they're: bug ridden, lack a significant number of features, slow, and have significant compatibility problems for all but the most simple of documents. Don't even get my started about KWord.

spreadsheets

Bull.

web browsing

Please. Both netscape and mozilla for Linux today are behind where Netscape and IE were years ago for Windows, never mind today, when it comes to _real usability_ (as in decent speed/memory footprint/UI/rendering quality).

calendars

Which?

farting around on the job

Name them.

Linux has a great many apps that can do all of these things, thus satisfying the huge majority of those who actually work at their computers (or avoid working at their computers). Users don't demand anything more than this, because most users aren't employed in jobs that need anything more complicated. If you think otherwise you need to get out more.

This world is not binomial. Merely "having" an application that you can fit in checkbox A, B, and C is not the same thing as really having an application that really works for the user. Merely having a decent application (rare for Linux's desktop) is not sufficient for what most users to find Linux an acceptable choice. The fact is that Linux's desktop applications themselves are of (vastly) inferior quality to what can be found on Windows, prompting most users to prefer Windows (or Mac even) in that in and of itself. Furthermore, there are many other important flaws in Linux, as a package (not just the kernel...as in Linux+X+WM+UI+drivers...etc), which make independent use of Linux much more trouble than it is worth.

So, FUD-guy, think up a new line. Yours is old, outdated, and simply not true anymore. Worse, it's boring. If you're going to slag Linux at least choose something that might actually be true.

It's the truth, whether or not you believe it. I've been using Linux for many years now. I'd love to see Windows/MS fall and Linux succeed (not for Open Source/"Free" idealogy though). However, it's certainly not nearly there yet and I can't recommend Linux to users today at the their expense (time, effort, resources). What's more, I believe the current development and business models have serious flaws so I am skeptical that it ever will (at least in its current configuration).

Re:Not so quick...

[maxpublic]

Linux's software may not be quite as bad as it used to be, but it still is far below the state of Macintosh even. The level of moderation suggests that most people here agree with my sentiments. What's more consumers are not exactly flooding Linux en masse.

And I repeat: FUD. Utter crap. The functionality of the apps available on Linux far exceed what any normal user would require. Your claims to the contrary don't change reality.

As for consumers not flooding the Linux market, this has nothing to do with the quality of the apps. This should be readily apparent even to you. Try thinking about it for more than thirty seconds to see if you can come up with any other reason Linux may not be taking an entrenched, monopolistic desktop market by storm (duuuuuh). The DOJ had some ideas, before that wanker Bush took office.

It's rather clear, however, that no matter how functional or stable Linux apps are you'll scream to the high heavens that they can't equal the inane, shitty crap that comes from Redmond.

Please, if you're that much in love with Bill's little tool then stick with the Windows you love so much (Linux user my hairy ass). You claim you've been using "Linux for many years now", but it's obvious from your rants that you despise Linux, think it sucks, and can't hope to compete with Windows. I seriously doubt that you've done much more than tried to install Mandrake some time in the past and failed miserably at it.

As for the 'development models', if you don't like open source/free software then stick with Windows - it's apparent that's about your speed anyway. Claiming that the model is flawed is fucking laughable considering just how far things have come, and how quickly, using that model. Any rational person would be amazed - that is, if they weren't disciples of the Great Gates.

Max

Re:Not so quick...

[FallLine]

And I repeat: FUD. Utter crap. The functionality of the apps available on Linux far exceed what any normal user would require. Your claims to the contrary don't change reality.

Your assertions are totally unsupported.

As for consumers not flooding the Linux market, this has nothing to do with the quality of the apps. This should be readily apparent even to you. Try thinking about it for more than thirty seconds to see if you can come up with any other reason Linux may not be taking an entrenched, monopolistic desktop market by storm (duuuuuh). The DOJ had some ideas, before that wanker Bush took office.

It is you that needs to think. If, as you assert, users can get all the software they need and want (with the ease of use of Windows), then why does MS' monopoly matter in the least? It really can't, not reasonably anyways. You couldn't even call *that* a monopoly. Their *current* monopoly is largely contingent on software development. Your assertion flies in the face of economic theory.

If the user is perfectly capable of switching software platforms, then MS is essentially toothless. While existing OEMs that are primarily selling Windows machines may not be willing to risk alienating MS by bundling Linux, MS' influence over them is derived entirely from the *relative* value of their OS and applications software. In other words, someone else (or them) would soon flood the market. Whatever price breaks the MS OEMs get pale in comparison to the price breaks on the supposedly equal Linux desktop platform (OS-WM-Apps).

I, on the other hand, feel that MS still IS a monopoly. Because Linux has such slim marketshare on desktops, no sane software developer is going to spend millions of dollars developing software that can compete head to head against that that is available for Windows--the economics are NOT there. [They (and OSS-minded people) will spend much smaller amounts of time/money/effort developing software that may take the Linux desktop, but not Windows.] Likewise, no sane commercial developer is going to try to develop a desktop OS that can compete head to head against Windows. It's a chicken and the egg problem. Then, of course, we have Office compatibility issues and such...but you deny this also, by asserting that Linux apps are perfectly capable. Blah.

It's rather clear, however, that no matter how functional or stable Linux apps are you'll scream to the high heavens that they can't equal the inane, shitty crap that comes from Redmond.

It's quite clear that you either:

a) Have not used them yourself.
b) Do know quality from crap.
c) Do not use them often enough, with sufficient complexity, to notice their many flaws.

Most likely, all of the above in your case.

I believe that MS' Applications and OS(s) are generally crappy given the amount of revenue they generate and the age. [In other words, it's well below the quality of what would be generated in a more competetive market place.] However, even MS' crappy software had millions of dollars and man hours poored into it. You are a fool if you think even those efforts are easily matched by a couple part time hackers or a company spending 1/1000th the amount of money on R&D.

lease, if you're that much in love with Bill's little tool then stick with the Windows you love so much (Linux user my hairy ass). You claim you've been using "Linux for many years now", but it's obvious from your rants that you despise Linux, think it sucks, and can't hope to compete with Windows. I seriously doubt that you've done much more than tried to install Mandrake some time in the past and failed miserably at it.

I think Linux has its place (e.g., servers, highly administrated environments, etc). But right now that's certainly not on the desktop.

And yes, I HAVE used and use Linux--all the major distributions. Debian, Slackware, Redhat, Suse, Mandrake, and others. The first Linux distro that I installed on my own machine was Redhat 2.0. [Messed around with slackware long before that.] How about you?

Btw, I develop software and I program in numerous languages. I'm a long time Unix user. In other words, Linux doesn't scare me. However, Linux on the desktop does take my time, which is valuable. Thus, I rather not use it when I can avoid it.

As for the 'development models', if you don't like open source/free software then stick with Windows - it's apparent that's about your speed anyway. Claiming that the model is flawed is fucking laughable considering just how far things have come, and how quickly, using that model. Any rational person would be amazed - that is, if they weren't disciples of the Great Gates.

Bull. I've stated my position on Open Source MANY MANY times on slashdot. If you care to look it up, then do so.

Btw, Nice troll. Nice User# too. Want to hop on another bandwagon?

s/small/large/

[FallLine]

5) If Linux's desktop marketshare is so small, why are so few commercial companies porting their desktop software to Linux?

Re:As someone who has hated Outlook for a long tim

[Anonymous Coward]

Score 4, interesting? More like score -1, flame.
OH wait, this is slashdot, gnome-lover central.

general problem with Gnome/Kde apps?

[_ska]

So I have a question, not a flame, and would really like to know the answer to this.

I don't use Gnome/Kde on my machines. However, we set up a few systems in the lab for others to use, and they wanted to give redhat a spin. Fine by me.

I used these machines for a while, and thought I would play with some of the gnome apps, see what they could do... So I used gnumeric, etc. plus some of the little apps like gomecard.

That last one is where the trouble started. I logged in from another building, wanting to check an address. Gnomecard wouldn't run because I didn't have a gnome session running. The gnome session only ran if I was logged into X on that machine. I can't start a session up if someone else using the machine.

WTF? Is this a conspiracy to make these machines useless over the network? I asked around, and KDE seems to have the same problem.

So I diked gnome out of the machines in the lab, so that people don't get tied to these apps.

Anyone have a solution? IMO, this is not one of the 'features' we should be copying from MS. If you think COM/Corba is the way to do code reuse, fine --- but tying people to a 1 machine 1 user model is braindamaged.

S

Re:general problem with Gnome/Kde apps?

[dangermouse]

I asked around, and KDE seems to have the same problem.

I can't really comment on GNOME, as I don't use it regularly... but I routinely run KMail, Konsole, and Konqueror across an ssh forward with no problems.

Re:general problem with Gnome/Kde apps?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've happily run gnome-session with multiple users locally (multiple displays) a long time ago, though IIRC /dev/dsp permissions get set incorrectly. You can at least run panel, and I *think* all of gnome session over a network.

Any other experiences?

Re:As someone who has hated Outlook for a long tim

[SweenyTod]

Apple started getting all upset at people copying their user interfaces, and all I can say is that I really hope these Evolution people don't get hit by the same problem - MS telling them to stop copying their user interfaces.

Having said that though, this looks a fantastic piece of software. The peer to peer calender stuff is a much used thing in the Windows world, so it's great to see it running under X too.

Re:"One of the most important projects..."

[odigity]

There is nothing amusing about Evolution being praised as important - it is! Any linux advocate who is responsible for implementing a groupware solution for their company (such as myself) and has had negative experience in the past with MS Exchange and Outlook (such as myself) would be thrilled to finally have an alternative for the first time on the horizon.

I'm bouncing in my seat...

Good, but why in C?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've used evolution here and there. I've found it to be a nice program. When I used the 0.9 version I found that there were still enough bugs to make me use kmail instead. Overall, I think it will make a great addition to any desktop.

The only drawback that I can see is that it is written in C. I guess I just don't understand why anybody would write something new (unless it needed to be really compact) in a non-object-oriented language. It just seems like for the sake of bug-fixing and keeping the code clean that you'd want an OO approach.

I'm not out to start a flamewar; I guess I just don't understand why a process-oriented language would be used for something this huge (other than the fact that the gnome-libs are C).

Could anybody tell me why this is?

Re:Good, but why in C?

[Junta]

First just a comment saying that C and OO approaches are not mutually exclusive. You can have an OO approach in C (as gtk does). It is ugly as hell, and really doesn't make things that much easier to maintain than traditional C code, but it is possible. Not really defending this, just saying OO can be implemented in practically any language, just some can do it better than others..

As to why it is still in C++, I'll guess to make it consistent with the rst of Gnome (obvious) Why was Gnome done in C? Probably partially out of language bigotry. But some somehwat more valid reasons:
1) Give programmers maximum choice. It is easier to call C libraries from C++ apps than vice-version. If it had been based in C++, the C wrappers would be needed for any functionality, while C++ can call native C code without problems (usually)
2) A belief that C++ cannot be as fast as C. There is a little bit of overhead in C++, somewhat blown out of proportion by anti-C++ people, and therefore people think C++ is inefficient. Not really enough of a performance problem to justify this, but it is an explanation.
3) To this day g++ has been wishy-washy with how C++ code should be compiled. With gcc-3, hopefully we are coming to the end of those days. libstdc++ has changed so many times in terms of ABI, that programs compiled for one distro have little hope of making it on another. For maximum binary and source portability, C code was, especially at the beginning of gnome, the only choice.

There may be others, but these occur to me right off..

Re:Good, but why in C?

[Anonymous Coward]

From what I read from Sun regarding moving Gnome to Solaris, C code is easier to move. This was given as one of the reasons they chose to use Gnome over KDE. I don't know enought to agree with the statement, but there it is.

Re:Good, but why in C?

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks. That makes sense.

After spending the summer working with 4 year old perl code I got a steady mistrust for non-OO code. I guess I should have looked into this before I posted because I wasn't aware that Enlightenment was in C++.

That's really interesting. Thanks a lot!

Re:Good, but why in C?

[Anonymous Coward]

OO also isn't inherently good, as many people seem to claim. I like C , but it isn't an end-all be-all, and definitely does have disadvantages.

It pretty much comes down to this.

a) C isn't as bad as it used to be, but if you're writing a big program and using the STL, you get a fair amount of memory overhead.

b) Lots of platforms that GNOME targets *still* have broken C implementations in this day and age. Look at the mozilla project compatibility docs sometime -- you can only use a tiny subset of the C feature set, because most compilers somewhere break something.

c) Load time. Compare load time of KDE programs to GNOME programs. According to the KDE folks, this is Linux's linker's fault.

d) You can use C from C . You can't (with reasonable performance) use C from C.

e) The GNU folks are in the middle of breaking the C ABI and Red Hat started a third C ABI, so it's much harder to distribute precompiled C programs.

f) Just a general complaint with g -- it's *very* slow to compile C relative to commercial compilers I've used (Solaris's cc, Metrowerks' Codewarrior). There's an order of magnitude between compiling C and C .

Re:Good, but why in C?

[be-fan]

2) A belief that C++ cannot be as fast as C. There is a little bit of overhead in C++, somewhat blown out of proportion by anti-C++ people, and therefore people think C++ is inefficient. Not really enough of a performance problem to justify this, but it is an explanation.
>>>>>>
That's not even remotely true these days. In fact, the opposite is probably true. On Windows (which makes up 90% of the desktop computing world, like it or not) C++ has been in use so long that compiler writers have been optimizing it for a long time. Straight C semantics probably get a lot less attention these days than do C++ OO semantics. As such, C++ is probably faster for day to day code. Also, there are cool things one can do with templates (such as static optimizations and generalized container classes that don't need to deference type-specific pointers) that you can't do easily in C.

Re:Good, but why in C?

[damiam]

That's not even remotely true these days. In fact, the opposite is probably true. On Linux (which is the operating system Evolution runs on, like it or not) C has been in use for so long that compiler writers have been optimizing it for a long time. Straight C semantics probably get a lot more attention than do C++ OO semantics. As such, C is probably faster for day to day code (although I concede that C++ does have more features).

Re:As someone who has hated Outlook for a long tim

[Anonymous Coward]

ROFL, no kidding.... that's one of the reasons why I ended up writing my own mp3 playlist program from scratch. It kills me seeing mysql being use in cases where using something like a DIRECTORY STRUCTURE or flat text file would do just fine.

search for roomjuice on freshmeat to check it out

-- gid

Linux Software != Hard to install

[JCMay]

Ximian has an answer for that: Red Carpet (usually) works great. Lately they've had some signature deficiencies, and there have been some dependencies that got missed WRT GIMP modules last night.

Beyond that Linux has much more comprehensive on-line documentation than Windows, in my estimation.

Case in point: I bought a Mitsume IDE CD-RW drive for my wife's school. I couldn't make any of the Windows software recognize it as a writer. I swapped it out for an older Mitsumi drive in my Linux box, and it worked just fine! Go figure. (I took the older drive to school, and *it* worked!)

I think a previous poster was right: Windows is thought to be easy because it's ubiquitous. People mistake familiarity for ease. Bruce Tognazzini talks about this idea.

Re:Linux Software != Hard to install

[spudnic]

Ximian has an answer for that: Red Carpet [ximian.com] (usually) works great.

Don't applications have to be added to the Red Carpet database before they show up on people's desktops? What is needed is a simple installation procedure that doesn't require the software to be one of the offerings in Red Carpet (or something like it).

This is going to be almost impossible as long as library dependencies are an issue. I'm no guru, but there has to be some way around this.

Beyond that Linux has much more comprehensive on-line documentation [linuxdoc.org] than Windows, in my estimation.

Could this be because Linux needs more on-line documentation? Most Windows users get their machines with Windows already installed. They work their way through figuring out how to do what they need to do and that's it. They don't really want or need online docs unless they plan on getting in deeper.

About the hardware... Yes, I've seen Windows barf on hardware before. I have also had the same kinds of problems with Linux distrobutions. The important point is, most people would know the path to take to resolve hardware problems within Windows. If the Linux installer doesn't recongnize somebody's hardware, they're pretty much out of luck because they have no idea how to troubleshoot it. I've seen this over an over with (even rather intelligent) people trying to install Linux.

Re:Linux Software != Hard to install

[high]

Don't applications have to be added to the Red Carpet database before they show up on people's desktops? What is needed is a simple installation procedure that doesn't require the software to be one of the offerings in Red Carpet (or something like it).

This is going to be almost impossible as long as library dependencies are an issue. I'm no guru, but there has to be some way around this.

Is this really such a problem? Look at how apt and debian works. All the programs that an average user needs stored in a central place. No searching! Just choose what you want to install and there you go. No such thing as different installation programs for different applications such as in windows. They all share a common frontend (debconf) and the installation is done by thrusted, high quality applications such as dpkg.

Red Carpet and apt is absolutly the way to go! It might not be there now but its constantly evolving!

Agreed

[Anonymous Coward]

Ximian appears to have the same business plan as Eazel. Take from that what you will

Re:As someone who has hated Outlook for a long tim

[Prop]

search for roomjuice on freshmeat to check it out

Dude!

I've been looking for something just like that! Funny that it didn't turn up when I searched 'meat... I was actually considering writing my own, but this looks like it willl fit the bill nicely ! Awesome!

Thanks for the pointer - I'll make sure to let you know how it turns out!

Re:Yes you can build & run GNOME under Windows

[MindStalker]

Thanks, for the info, exactly what I was looking for :)
Actually I think I'll see how much load my linux server can take, and try running it under remote X11.

so will it finally work in FreeBSD?

[stuq]

I've been following the progress of Evolution for a while, trying it out at various stages and on different distros. The BSD port seems to lag significantly behind the other versions feature-wise. No contacts, no appointments, no to-do lists as of yet. Anyone know when the BSD versions will be brought up to spec?

Linux as a desktop , More support from the users..

[monkeyserver.com]

I'll agree that I may have underated Mac, but I still think that there is a strong Linux market than Mac.

Maybe it's just me, being in the Web/.com arena, but most ppl I know are running linux, either as a primary OS, or as a dev OS, and a good percentage of them do desktop type work on Linux.

I think a reason why many comercial companies aren't porting to linux is that they feel ppl won't buy. That is true for the most part, ppl in the linux market feel that they should be able to get a good solution for free, so they aren't willing to buy a software package that is available for download for free.

I think both of our arguments are flawed, but I'll stand by my guns.

*IF* Mac is as big as you say then why aren't there VAST mac dev projects as there are for linux?

think about that

Okaaaayy..

[AltGrendel]

But will it work with RH 7.2? As I recall you had to
un-install if you were doing an upgrade.

Bonobo on Windows vs. COM

[jonabbey]

Full agreement on the value of getting the GNOME and GTK apps going on Windows. If Evolution is to be a truly meaningful alternative to Outlook, it has to go where the Outlook users are.

That said, I'd love to know whether Evolution would turn into a COM shell on Windows or whether all of Bonobo would have to be ported? Is Bonobo similar enough to COM these days that the various Evolution modules could be rebuilt as COM objects easily?

Why all the bloat?!

[rice_burners_suck]

After two years of hard work and more than 700 thousand lines of code written...

Why the devil does this thing require 700 thousand lines of code? In fact, why is everything related to GNOME so bloated and clunky?

I've been following the development of GNOME for about two years. In my opinion, there is nothing original coming out of that project. They're trying to mimic Windows, and doing a really horrible job at it. (No, that's not a flame or troll. That's my opinion.) My desktops run X and IceWM. I don't run any so-called `desktop environment' because I prefer the command line. And because, when I investigated GNOME and gave it chances several times, it greatly disappointed me. Features? You can implement all the features of GNOME in a fraction of the code. I mean seriously guys, GNOME is more bloated than Emacs! Those `sleepless hackers' did a little TOO MUCH hard work. What happened to `tools, not policy' and the concept of actually doing things efficiently?

After my several bad experiences with GNOME, I have decided that neither the `desktop' nor any component produced by that project have any place on my computers. Nice try, guys. But Microsoft already released the crap you're attempting to rip off. If I wanted slow, buggy, cumbersome and unnecessarily LARGE software, I'd use Windows.

Re:Why all the bloat?!

[Zack]

You seem to be missing the most important point here. Choice.

There are tons of small email programs... tons of text mode ones... lots of text calanders... if you want them, you can use them. But what if you _want_ something like Outlook on Linux? What if you _like_ having nice fancy graphics and everything all built together?

Slamming projects because _you_ don't want to use it is not the point.

FWIW, I still use mutt and fetchmail, but I'm glad to see there is always more CHOICE.

Re:Why all the bloat?!

[kputnam]

You complain about the size of the code, yet I don't think you claimed to have ever run Evolution. And little do you know, the whole program is compartmentalized. There are components for the calendar, email program, contacts, and every part of the whole application.

With your logic, the Linux kernel is extraordinarily bloated... I mean there must be millions of lines of code. And it doesn't matter that it's all subdivided into drivers, core internals, and file systems... it simple has too many lines of code. Perhaps you should switch to MINIX if you are a true believer in your apparent "logic".

Re:bloat aka low level languages

[sabre]

Another way to look at it is that they are writing in a very low level language. That language, the wonderful and mysterious C, is well loved by the Gnome project. C is wonderful for low level small programs, but it tends to fall down a bit when scaling up to an application of this size.

One very important thing to remember about code size is that LOC is a very good indicator of # of bugs. Reducing the number of lines of code (obviously without reducing functionality) is a good way to reduce # of bugs, and also to make your hackers more productive.

There are many higher level languages available, in many different language families. Often high level languages get blasted for being in efficient... but this isn't neccesarily so. For example, with all of the "object" stuff implemented (the hard way) in C, you are paying exactly the same runtime overhead that C++ pays when it has an object. All you are gaining, is the joy of having to implement everything yourself and the possibility of your naming schemes getting out of whack.

I think it's great that Ximian is continuing to survive and is about to "unleash" their masterpiece onto the world. I just wonder how much faster it could have gotten here if they didn't use C.

I find it interesting that the open source community (for the most part), tends to stick with C as the language of choice. Lowest common denominator choices like this are usually not the best.

-Chris

Slack and Evo...

[PhilMills]

Ximian has a bit to say about this in their support pages. The gist of it is that they give mad propz to Slack users, and give instructions on how to convert things over to a Slack-friendly format.

-PhilMills

What is the plan???

[rgelb1]

I still don't understand what is Ximian's business model? They make all this great software, plus the Mono stuff, all of which brings zero revenue.

Can someone explain it?

Re:What is the plan???

[sg_oneill]

They are using one of those majikal dot comulator to induce buzzword fields that attract suits thus pumping up 'market penetration' and stock prices. When the price is high enough , they will pull stocks, and anounce that the market is 'adjusting' , thus bringing down civilisation as we know it.

Either that, or they have some clever people doing something or another.

Oh ok. I admit it. I have no idea.

Re:What is the plan???

[damiam]

I'm not sure, but I think it has something to do with:

• Helping companies make the switch to Gnumeric, Evolution, and their other software
• Support contracts for their software
• Liscensing Red Carpet for corparate use distributing in-house software

They probably have some better explanation on their web site, but I couldn't find it.

I am far from an expert...

[cnelzie]

...but, the little that I know regarding programming and those languages is that C is much more portable that C++.

I believe that they were thinking towards being able to port their project far easier to other operating systems and architectures.

Of course, I could be wrong and they may have disregarded standard C and went with Operating Environment Specific libraries instead of developed their own easily ported libraries.

If the above is the case, then I agree with you and they should have definately programmed it all in C++.

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Re:I am far from an expert...

[CH-BuG]

It's rather a matter of being capable to interface to other languages. Having an explicit object implementation makes it possible to hook into the native object mechanism of higher-level languages (see the list of available gtk and gnome bindings !)

Re:I am far from an expert...

[sabre]

C more portable than C++?

Yes, perhaps, but you have to realize that G++ is portable to just about every single platform that GCC is... and that is a lot of them. The new G++ has an excellent C++ front end that is quite standard comformant.

One question though, is what platforms are you really winning by using C on? If there isn't a C++ compiler for the platform, are you really that interested in using a big groupware application on it? (assuming it's an older platform)...

-Chris

Re:I am far from an expert...

[high]

Your just talking about the compiler arent you? Just because a g++ compiler exist on the system doesnt mean it can compile c++ code from Linux. I have been following fink. A project to package open source applications for Mac OSX. If you check out the currently existing packages you will see that gnome is alot more succesful then kde when it comes to number of packages.

In the FAQ you can see the question "Q: Why are there no packages for KDE?" that sais:

A: Because there simply are none.

Seriously, KDE has (or at least had) serious problems that prevent a port to Mac OS X. It assumes it can do things with shared libraries that are only possible on ELF systems like Linux, *BSD and Solaris. It could very well be that some people are trying to port it nevertheless, but we haven't heard of any breakthroughs yet. Note that Qt is a different story, we have a package for it and it works fine.

Re:I am far from an expert...

[sabre]

It assumes it can do things with shared libraries that are only possible on ELF systems like Linux, *BSD and Solaris.

Thanks for answering your own question. It has nothing to do with their choice of language... it has to do with how they choose to use the OS.

-Chris

Re:I am far from an expert...

[Anonymous Coward]

C++ compilers are certainly getting better but try finding a compiler that can maintain the speed gain you might get from C++. There are many more efficient compilers for C.

Re:I am far from an expert...

[fault0]

A KDE port to OSX really has nothing do with C++ or C. Read the faq.

Re:I am far from an expert...

[lazarius]

Preprocessed headers... 'nuff said. MIKE

Re:I am far from an expert...

[Anonymous Coward]

KDE 2.x uses a hack called kdeinit that preloads shared libraries in the right order to minimize relocations and speed up application start times. It is a very non-portable hack, which is why you don't see KDE 2.x on some commercial UNIX platforms either.

I believe it is possible to build KDE without kdeinit, but I don't think too many people using Fink really care all that much. First of all, they already have a desktop environment in MacOS X and are primarily interested in apps. Second, those few that are interested in running KDE stuff are hoping they will eventually be able to build it using the native (non-X11) Qt port to get the Aqua look & feel. That leaves the GNU-Darwin users, who generally aren't interested in KDE either for philosophical reasons.

All things considered, the fact that KDE is written in C++ really isn't an issue at all. And the Fink distribution contains a fair number of other C++ apps and libs.

Hm

[strombrg]

Doesn't sound like an evolution bug to me.

Sounds like an NFS problem.

I have the same trouble on a redhat system with mutt (another mail program) if I use a too-recent version of nfs-utils. I think this was only on 6.2, IIRC. I don't recall having the problem on redhat 7.1.

Re:As someone who has hated Outlook for a long tim

[Anonymous Coward]

If you don't like the windowish interface, then why are you using KDE? You probably like to run KDE with the Win2K theme, with the fade-in menus enabled.. Dude, that is a total rip off of Windows, just look at Konqueror, the icon style, the new 'wizards' everywhere.. It's Windows on Linux.

Bloated, yes, for an email client, but

[einhverfr]

Groupware !=email

If you want just email, why the hell would you want to run Evolution? No, kmail, etc. are better alternatives. However, if you want groupware, kmail, etc. will not cut it anymore than Outlook Express would work for a Fortune 500 company...

My point is that groupware is more than an email program and address book. It is an ability to truly integrate several aspects of collaborative work, and email is just a piece of that. Linux needs groupware in order to be successful in those things that are around today. Evolution helps fill this need, but we also need open source groupware servers. Maybe that will be my next project...

GroupWare?

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't get me wrong, I think it is fabulous that Ximian is doing this and I can't wait for Evolution to go 1.0. I wish they would port it to KDE too but, that's a whole other kettle of fish.

But, can this really be called groupware? Granted it is very much like Outlook, hopefully somewhat more worm resistant. But, Outlook and in my mind Evolution is not groupware. These are email clients or PIMs not groupware.

To be a true groupware application there needs to be a backend server. Something to centralize the calendars and support the other applications within. It is on these backend servers that you build and run your own groupware apps or applets. This is what Exchange or Notes does.

It is Exchange and Notes that are the groupware applications, not Outlook. And, unless I am missing something, Evolution is just an email/PIM app.

If I am wrong please let me know but, the way that I see it, Linux still doesn't have a good groupware application, except for Notes.

Everything that...

[cnelzie]

...I have seen, regrading C++, is that it is pretty dependent upon OS Architecture Specific Libraries.

Mind you, I have only begun to simply dabble with programming. I have no professional training on the matter.

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Re:Everything that...

[Anonymous Coward]

..I have seen, regrading C++, is that it is pretty dependent upon OS Architecture Specific Libraries.

Mind you, I have only begun to simply dabble with programming. I have no professional training on the matter.

Then why are you spreading uninformed misinformation?

Re:Everything that...

[Anonymous Coward]

No, C++ isn't any more dependent on OS or architecture specific libraries than C. However, C++ code *is* potentially less portable than C code because the C++ standard is relatively new. Few compilers are fully compliant with the standard, and some (e.g. MS VC++) are fairly non-compliant. Beyond that, some platforms (e.g. MS VC++ again) lack a complete implementation of the standard C++ libraries.

That said, the portability argument against C++ tends to be way overblown. C++ libraries and apps tend to be just as portable as C libraries and apps as long as you confine yourself to UNIX platforms. And if your target is gcc/g++, then there really isn't much of a portability issue at all.

IMHO, most of the arguments against using C++ offered up by free software developers are pretty weak. The only argument I've heard that has any merit is that it's hard to create bindings for other languages to hook into a C++ library, but easy to create bindings for a C library (because languages like Perl & Python have a C based extension interface).

Re:As someone who has hated Outlook for a long tim

[Nicolas MONNET]

I use Evolution along with IMAP, it's the best IMAP client I've seen so far, along with Netscape 4.74. Don't laugh.

Anyway, with IMAP I can read my mail with Evo on my PC, and thanks to IMP anywhere with a web browser.

I used to use Pine for the same purpose, but you just can't expect to find SSH clients anywhere. And you just can't always install one.

print <MOUTH> "code"; # please

[Doktor Memory]

You can implement all the features of GNOME in a fraction of the code.

Fascinating assertion, captain. I look forward to seeing the release of your far-more-svelte competing project. Let us know when it's out, eh?

Re:As someone who has hated Outlook for a long tim

[Alan]

Agreed, except I can see where a project like mp3kult could be handy for mp3 collectors such as myself. I am right now doing everything by hand, using a combination of id3ed, id3ren, mp3rename, mp3_check, and a couple of others and organizing everything in a directory heirarchy. However, once they are all organized, I'd like to get them into a database so that I can easily do searches and things. If I want to see all files with a a bitrate 128 that's very easy with a database, but not as easy with a flat text file or using xmms :) It's bloat yes, and it's un-needed, but I can see where it can be useful for organization. As an aside, the little I've played with mp3kult it seemed pretty snazzy, built in player, built in editing of tags and filenames from the DB, etc etc. Very sweet.

Ximian employee shows Brains

[bryanbrunton]

Check out this quote from a Ximian employee's website about the attack on the World Trade Center:

"The attack ... was not cowardly nor senseless ... "

Great work on Evolution Ximian, now if you could only hire some employees who have a clue.

Re:Ximian employee shows Brains

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm incredibly impressed with your ability to take a quote out of context, shorten it, and then try to prove someones intelligence level with it. Dumbass.

-dag (dag@daggerdesign.com)

Note : I'm not affilliated with the person in question, I just don't see the point of being so outrageously biased towards a persons point of view that you couldn't at LEAST use the full quote while flaming him. Then again, if you had, your argument would have toppled over.

Re:Ximian employee shows Brains

[bryanbrunton]

You wanted the entire text that comprises the quote:

"Anybody who knows US history in Latin America should have seen 9/11 coming. The attack was evil, but it was not cowardly nor senseless nor unprecedented nor unforseen."

It was impossible for me to take such a short bit out of context. You obviously have no understanding of what "taking something out of context" means. Furthermore, I didn't apply any context of my own to the quote, aside from generally saying that that Ximian employee is an idiot.

The fact is that Ximian employees an imbucile who believes that murdering 5,000 people is neither "cowardly" or "senseless".

So much the better for them, if they don't want my business, I can go elsewhere.

Re:Ximian employee shows Brains

[chetohevia]

Hi. I'd like to defend my statement and also the company I work for. As a Slashdot reader, I'm sure you are familiar with the statement "My personal political beliefs do not represent those of my employer." Well, that applies here. I'm a free individual person and I have my beliefs. I'm a technical writer and I have a job. Not related.

I am, for the record, not an imbecile. I am also a patriot and I believe deeply in the freedoms that the United States of America offers me as its citizen. I believe especially in my freedom of expression, and my freedom to disagree with the policy of my government, and my freedom to hold pacifist views.

What are those beliefs that I am trying to express on my home page?
I believe that patriotism does not mean that I agree that carpetbombing Afghanistan is exactly the right thing to do. I don't see how B-52s killing Afghans helps the people who died in the WTC attacks.

My statement was not in any way a defense of the terrorists. I'm just trying to point out that people who are surprised by the fact that the US is disliked are missing a great deal of history and context.

To really parse that statement we'll need to define some terms.

By "senseless" I mean to say that it would not be possible to comprehend why such an attack occurred. Because we can look at the motivations of the attackers (a percieved undermining of their culture and religion by the US) and understand what they were, we cannot call the attack senseless.

Their reason was not a *good* reason to blow up a building. There is no good reason to blow up a building and kill thousands of people. Which is why I don't think that the US should be doing it either.

Now, let's talk cowardice. A coward is someone who shrinks from pain and danger, who avoids the call of duty. Well, these hijackers may have heard some twisted duty call, but they were not afraid to die. They were not cowards. You don't hear a lot about those people. You hear about brave heroes, not brave villans. But these were brave villans.

So, if you still think I'm stupid, fine. I'm perfectly willing to have you dislike or disrespect me. More upsetting is the idea that you would turn down perfectly good GPL'ed software just because you disagree with one employee's views.

If you disagree with ESR about gun control, you don't have to stop using his software. If you disagree with RMS about free love and private property, you can still appreciate emacs. So, Red Carpet and Evolution are still great software, even if you don't like the politics of the person who writes the manuals.

Yours,

Aaron Weber
Technical Writer
Ximian, Inc

http://primates.ximian.com/~aaron/

Re:Ximian employee shows Brains

[bryanbrunton]

Your beliefs, once properly explained, are reasonable. I apologize for calling you an imbecile as you have demonstrated that you are clearly not one.

Not that I don't think that you are not confused or at least not realistic.

Quite specifically, I don't believe that the passificist approach is of much use in a world with nuclear weapons. In comes down to this: the US administration and most of the western world is freaked that Al Queada and the Taliban will acquire nuclear weapons, probably suit case nukes. We either take them out or they take us out. It sounds like a crazy motivation, but I guarantee you that is why we are attacking the Afghans. And if you look in the US political context of this motivation, any action besides ordering an attack would probably result in some type of impeachment proceedings against Bush.

My defintion of coward is someone who engages in a violent act against another person when the person being attacked has no possibility to defend himself. Stabbing in the back, setting off a car bomb, flying a plane into a building all fall with my definition of cowardly. Perhaps you have a different defintion.

And killing innocent civilians easily qualifies as "senseless" for me.

We simply have different approaches to the terminology here.

option to share mbox with other mail applications

[fetta]

One of the nicer options in Evolution is the ability to share Mbox's with other mail applications such as Mutt (you have to specifically configure it this way -it's not the default). Then you can use "the right tool for the right job." A nice slick gui when you work locally, a clean text based interface for when you SSH in over a slow link.

Re:As someone who has hated Outlook for a long tim

[Sloppy]

I just can't get over the interface. Yes, yes, I know, it's "intuitive" (read: familiar to people who've used Outlook), it's just doesn't match the way I work.

Then you are not the target audience for this. The whole point is that it's supposed to be Outlook-like. Not because Outlook is technically or ergonomically worth copying, but because Outlook is strategically worth copying. Read what Miguel writes -- he's not trying to make the ultimate email reader; he's trying to make an infiltration tool.

There's no point in Unix-heads running this program. It's mean to be run by ex-Dozers, so that they won't notice/complain that they've been switcheroo'd.

Keep using whatever email reader you've always used. You're not supposed to switch to this.

Signature?

[Anonymous Coward]

What on earth does that sig of yours mean? Are we supposed to know it from something? Otherwise it sounds like filth.

Re:Linux as a desktop , More support from the user

[Anonymous Coward]

*IF* Mac is as big as you say then why aren't there VAST mac dev projects as there are for linux?

How many Mac developers are employed at Apple, Microsoft, Adobe, Macromedia, etc (companies that make money)?

How many Linux developers are actually employed doing desktop applications at non-Linux-oriented (ie not doomed to failure) companies? A few at AOL, a few at Sun, Corel guys on the unemployment line.

Counting college students making MP3 players for free, Linux wins, but capitalism hasn't seemed to recognize the vast Linux desktop market, if in fact it exists.

AFTERSTEP!

[Penguinoflight]

You are insane. My light window manager has more features than windows xp. Afterstep! Afterstep! It will run on machines that won't run windows 95 as well. Don't try to compare Gnome or KDE to Windows 95 when they are much more feature rich than windows xp.

Re:bloat aka low level languages

[jilles]

I would like to elaborate a bit on the LOC thing. There's some empirical evidence (forgive me that I omit the proper refs here) for the following two claims:
- regardless of the language, maintainance cost is proportional to the LOC
- regardless of the language, programmers have a more or less fixed productivity measured in LOC/timeunit.

In addition I've seen similar evidence as well as had it confirmed by senior software developers in large software companies that the average production of code throughout the development period of a large software project (>>100KLOC) is less than 1 LOC/day/developer.

If you accept this and use common sense you will realize that using a higher level language will allow you to deliver software both quicker and with fewer bugs. Of course, since time is the limiting factor on most sw. projects, the gained time is used to make more complex systems so new systems are generally as buggy but more feature rich.

BTW. I agree with you that the use of C for most real world projects is misguided these days since much better, equally well performing languages are available. It will be interesting to see how quick e.g. kmail (c++, I think) and mozilla (also C++ + scripting languages) will catch up with evolution.

We need a damn calendar server!

[pherret]

Evolution, in all it's glory, has the potential to be the best email/calendar/etc (read: Outlook clone). With all these email/calendar/etc software products (KMail, phpGroupware just to name two), the open source community doesn't have a replacement for an exchange server. The "Exchange Replacement" HOWTO doesn't cut it. IMAP is great for email, but what about group calendaring (besides passing iCal's back and forth).

How difficult would it be to implement a calendar-type server using an IMAP server? Maybe an iCal extension for your favorite IMAP server.

The ideal software product would even support Microsoft Outlook clients. I'm sure you could write an Outlook driver to hook into the server (I know HP's groupware product,forgot the name, did).

Re:As someone who has hated Outlook for a long tim

[chetohevia]

You're complaining about the default settings. Here's how to make it look like Eudora or any of the older email clients:

(This is GNOME after all, you can configure the UI a great deal)

First off hide the Shortcut Bar (View--> Shortcut Bar). You can add a folder-tree if you want, or leave a folder-tree available as a dropdown menu in the left end of the toolbar.

Then, for complete Eudora-ness, extend the bottom edge of the message list down until it completely hides the "preview pane". Voila! Use n and p to navigate unread messages, up and down arrows to forward and backwards in the messagelist regardless.

And of course, hit return to open a message in a new window.

Ximian Installer is borked

[Wonko42]

Perhaps it's just me, but when using the Ximian Installer to attempt to install Ximian Desktop and Evolution on Mandrake 8.1, I get an "Unable to download package set info" error message, no matter what mirror I select or what install option I choose.

So much for Ximian.

Re:Ximian Installer is borked

[Bluecoat93]

So the Ximian Installer is borked because you can't RTFM? Ximian has not yet released support for Mandrake 8.1, which you would have known if you had read their web site. Their OS and distribution support is clearly listed in several places on the site.

* Debian GNU/Linux 2.2 (Potato) on x86
* Linux Mandrake 7.0, 7.1, 7.2, 8.0
* LinuxPPC 2000
* Red Hat Linux 6.2, 7.0, 7.1, 7.2 on x86
* Solaris 7, 8 on UltraSPARC
* SuSE 6.4, 7.0, 7.1, 7.2 on x86
* Turbolinux 6.0
* Yellow Dog Linux 1.2, 2.0

Re:Ximian Installer is borked

[UtSupra]

Well, it can *never* solve dependencies (with Red hat 7.0 and 7.2) the worst thing is that it says to report the info below and the Window is empty!!! If it where a M$ product we would all be ROFL

geoshell

[SyntheticTruth]

For Win32, I use an alternative desktop shell called Geoshell. (Or ge0Shell, whatever.) It's really nice...cuts down on resource load, etc... And it's opened source. Basically, it puts "geobars" on your desktop that you add plug-ins too that can do nifty things.

With it, I have little to no desire to see Gnome on a Win32 desktop (other than for the geekiness of it ;) and I now have a nice, quick, personalized Win32 desktop.

Links:
http://www.geoshell.com/
https://sourceforge.net/projects/geoshell

Re:Linux as a desktop , More support from the user

[jonabbey]

Counting college students making MP3 players for free, Linux wins, but capitalism hasn't seemed to recognize the vast Linux desktop market, if in fact it exists.

The Linux market is hard to make money on because all of the damn Linux users keep insisting on writing their own software and sharing it for free. This will change eventually, as the user base expands beyond the hard core tech set. Things like StarOffice and Evolution will help drive that by expanding the user base, but anyone proposing to sell software on Linux will have to have products that are good enough that they won't be easily duplicated by free software authors.

I myself have bought a dozen commercial linux packages, mostly RedHat distros and Loki games. If the non-technical Linux user population was to grow to Macintosh levels, to say nothing of Windows levels, you'd see plenty of people willing to buy Linux software.

Sure would be nice if we had an LSB, though.

OSS hypocrites claim innovation, bash MS

[-=[ SYRiNX ]=-]

Open Source Software enthusiasts are always accusing Microsoft of not innovating: "Microsoft is a monopoly with no incentive to innovate! OSS has TRUE innovation while MS just talks about it!"

Evolution is yet another piece of evidence to the contrary. Its UI and usability are a near-exact duplication of Microsoft Outlook.

While real innovations usually build upon existing ideas, the fact that nearly all OSS/FS applications are poorer (less usable) mimics of commercial software proves where the innovation most important to the average Joe is really occuring.

Re:OSS hypocrites claim innovation, bash MS

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem here is timelines. While the open source concept has been around in some form for quite a while, it has only been recently that Open Source really exploded into a huge scene with lots of developers and users, and even more recently that they started worrying about the Average Joe. So now we play catch-up, and the fastest way to catch up is to duplicate until we're pretty much eye to eye with the competitors and can be called a viable alternative, which gets us users and market share. When we're done playing catch-up, I'm quite confident the Open Source community will pump out more innovation in this field that M$ could ever hope to. Look at the technical fields where we have been stronger for longer... tell me that any commercial company has bested Linux or *BSD kernel technology innovations (including a kernel that scales from embedded to large scale clusters). Show me a commercial *nix C compiler that has all the stuff of gcc 3.x.

Re:OSS hypocrites claim innovation, bash MS

[-=[ SYRiNX ]=-]

...and the fastest way to catch up is to duplicate until we're pretty much eye to eye with the competitors and can be called a viable alternative, which gets us users and market share...

I agree with the theory, but in practice OSS/FS tends to be a less-usable / poorer-quality mimic of commercial counterparts. That's why even the latest OSS/FS stuff still isn't a viable alternative to commercial stuff for most people.

When we're done playing catch-up, I'm quite confident the Open Source community will pump out more innovation in this field that M$ could ever hope to.

Why are you quite confident of this? Microsoft has three decades of experience with usability and design, carefully refining it and integrating it into the software development process. Microsoft is very good at innovating in the areas of usability and design and has a proven track record, whereas the OSS/FS communitiy has merely demonstrated their ability to somewhat poorly clone those innovations. If I were you, I wouldn't be so cocky.

Look at the technical fields where we have been stronger for longer... tell me that any commercial company has bested Linux or *BSD kernel technology innovations (including a kernel that scales from embedded to large scale clusters).

Don't you know that GNU/Linux and BSD don't scale nearly as well as most commercial Unixes? And don't you know that Windows 2000 and Windows XP Professional are just as reliable as GNU/Linux? The OSS/FS crowd still likes to beam proudly about its heritage of technical superiority, all while resting on its laurels. Meanwhile, commercial software has not only matched but outpaced the technical advantages in an easier-to-use form.

Show me a commercial *nix C compiler that has all the stuff of gcc 3.x.

Nearly all commercial C/C++ compilers produce tighter, leaner, more efficient binaries in less processing time than does gcc; numerous studies have proven this. The only great things about gcc are (1) strict ANSI/standards compliance, and (2) it's free.

bloat, but it's reusable bloat

[wrinkledshirt]

Don't forget that GNome is trying to put forward a component-oriented environment. As such, many of the flagship products are going to be pioneering many of these components that can be reused. Some of those hundreds of thousands of lines of code is stuff a future programmer can take advantage of.

Now, if you want to go into a discussion of the problems of bloated component environments in general, that's another thing entirely. But following the model is hardly Evolution's fault.

Re:bloat, but it's reusable bloat

[be-fan]

bloat, but it's reusable bloat
>>>>>>>
Dude, that phrase is an instant classic! Somebody mod this guy up!

Re:As someone who has hated Outlook for a long tim

[Evangelion]

"Keep using whatever email reader you've always used. You're not supposed to switch to this."

I think you mean, " You're not supposed to switch to this.". Makes more sense in the context to me, anyway.

Re:bloat aka low level languages

[nr]

LOC's have nothing to do with bloatness. LOC's depends on the coding style.

Example on how a function call can look like in many GNOME apps:

function(
foo,
bar,
fuu,
fuh,
feh
);

It could also be defined as:

function(foo, bar, fuu, fuh, feh);

Example this produces 8 lines of code:

while (foo)
{
function(bar);
}
else
{
function(foo);
}

It can also be done in one line by:

while (foo) { function(bar); } else { function(foo); }

Re:bloat aka low level languages

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, in most cases you incur greater overhead emulating OO features in C that are built into the language in C++. This is simply because the C++ compiler knows how to properly optimize the implementation and the C compiler does not. For example, in order to simulate a virtual function call in C, you need to look up a function pointer and call through it. On most modern CPU architectures, the C++ compiler implements virtual function calls using a jump table instead of a function pointer table, which is more efficient.

Re:Linux as a desktop , More support from the user

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess that I'm rather suspect that "The Linux Community" can produce commercial-quality desktop apps under their current model. Yes, there's probably exceptions (Gnumeric?).

Adobe decided they couldn't even sell Framemaker to Linux users, for example, and that's a classic Unix workstation app. Corel went down in flames. Loki probably sells more to the advocacy market than a real userbase.

Sure, Sun or AOL can come in and do the work as part of the "Get Microsoft" plan, but that's not quite the same thing. When the corporate deployments start (and they will), you'll see the commercial apps.

It's a kernel issue and it's fixed by RH

[/dev/zero]

I only had the NFS locking problem when the server was running RH's kernel 2.4.9-6, which has a bug in the NFS locking code. Upgrading the kernel to 2.4.9-12 solves this (as well as some scurity issues).

See kernel (RHSA-2001-142) for RH 7.1 You'll see links to download kernels for all supported RH versions.

Gordon.

Re:As someone who has hated Outlook for a long tim

[mbyte]

evolution's IMAP features are BASIC, most of all, its missing NAMESPACE ! thats very important if you have many shared folders ...

If u want to try a real powerfull albeit commercial IMAP client try mulberry (also for Linux/x86) at http://www.cyrusoft.com/

Netscape mail

[DunbarTheInept]

Despite all the problems with Netscape 4.7x as a browser, it's e-mail client does work very well with IMAP. That's one reason I still keep Netscape around. (For actual web surfing I'm using Konqueror now.)
I was looking at kmail - but it's IMAP support is nonexistant. I would welcome a good gui IMAP client for linux so I could finally stop wasting my precious RAM on the whole of netscape 4.7 (browser and composer and mail reader loaded in RAM all at once - oh joy) just to read mail.

Re:Netscape mail

[Raven667]

I also was holding on to Netscape mail because I couldn't find a decent IMAP client for Linux. Several months ago I switched from NS Mail to PINE and have been pretty happy. PINE doesn't have the mail filtering support that NS does but it is by far the fastest and most efficient IMAP client I have ever used. Opening my Inbox folder with ~10,000 messages takes only a few seconds (server is a PII-300 IIRC) and the message finding/selecting/zooming feature is second to none. PINE seems to be highly optimized so that it issues the most efficient IMAP commands possible.

Re:Netscape mail

[zfalcon]

Get a newer pine. 4.33 supports simple mail filtering.

Re:Netscape mail

[Raven667]

Thanks, I'm using PINE 4.40 right now. I still don't find the filtering as useful as in Evolution, Mozilla, Netscape, Kmail, etc. Maybe I'm missing something but I don't see any way of specifying more than one match rule ( this _and_ that _but_not_ this other thing ) and/or more than one target rule ( autogenerate reply _and_ copy to folder foo ).

Luckilly I no longer require such precise filtering so PINE is working out fine.

Slowtus Bloats

[Loundry]

For example, Lotus Notes has e-mail, calendar, sure, but it is primarily a general purpose platform for building applications that require managing documents as they move from person to
person.

It is not fair to call Lotus Notes groupware. It is more fair to call it "The Worst Software Ever Written."

One would think that a piece of software designed to help people "collaborate" would have to have a good UI as its backbone. Unfortunately, Lotus Notes is a case study in how *not* to design an interface. One of my favorite sites is iarchitect.com, a site that studies and discusses GUI design. Iarchitect.com has made an "in-depth" study of Lotus Notes and has this introduction to say about it:

We wish we found IBM's Lotus Notes a long time ago. This single application could
have formed the basis for the entire site. The interface is so problematic, that one might conclude that the designers had previously visited this site, and misread "Hall of Shame" as "Hall of Fame".

The following report is, naturally, quite damning. You can read it here.

I agree we need collaborative software, but I think you're totally wrong for upholding Lotus Notes as an example of "good collaborative software."

Re:Slowtus Bloats

[Anonymous Coward]

Since you are touting the iarchitect rant, there's a couple things you should be aware of:

1) It's an old version of Notes. Still valid in some respects, but needs to be updated.

2) A large number of complaints listed stem from a custom designed mail template and do not exist 'out of the box'. The author's response is pretty much "So what?" This would be like blaming VisualBasic for the numerous other crappy apps that iarchitect rips on.

That having been said, the Notes UI is clunky.

Re:Linux as a desktop , More support from the user

[FallLine]

I'll agree that I may have underated Mac, but I still think that there is a strong Linux market than Mac.

I disagree and I think the facts belly my opinion.

Maybe it's just me, being in the Web/.com arena, but most ppl I know are running linux, either as a primary OS, or as a dev OS, and a good percentage of them do desktop type work on Linux.

What do you mean by Web/.com arena? Are you talking about web software developers preferring Linux? Perhaps, given the popularity of Perl, CGI, and such. However, that's a pretty small part of the population. If you're talking about graphics and other related pursuits, I don't buy it. I don't know of a single graphics person that would seriously consider Linux's options on par with that of Windows even, never mind Macintosh (Mac generally being regarded as superior by them).

I think a reason why many comercial companies aren't porting to linux is that they feel ppl won't buy. That is true for the most part, ppl in the linux market feel that they should be able to get a good solution for free, so they aren't willing to buy a software package that is available for download for free.

Maybe they feel they'd much prefer to get it for free, but most Linux users even, in my experience, recognize that there is a real lack of software for the desktop, Free B./Free S. or $$$$. Certainly they'd jump at the opportunity to buy software if it offers them a significantly better option. I know I would. A small percentage of hardcore developers will never buy proprietary/commercial software, but surely they can't be that large a part of Linux's supposed desktop market. The real problem is that developers don't see the market share, plus Linux is a pain in the butt to target for applications compared to Windows/Macintosh.

I think both of our arguments are flawed, but I'll stand by my guns.

I don't see what part of my argument is particularly flawed, especially since it can rest on a number of them.

*IF* Mac is as big as you say then why aren't there VAST mac dev projects as there are for linux?

I won't deny that there is little Open Source effort for the Macintosh (although I hear MacOSX is starting to change this, given it's portability with BSD), but this is beside the point. You see tons of efforts for Linux/BSD because they're very much inline with the Open/Free/Hack idealogy. You see some for Windows because of its sheer size. You see few for Mac because its market share isn't even a 1/5th of Windows and because it (traditionally, though MacOSX is changing this) couldn't be more opposed to what Linux/BSD stands for.

My point was simply that Linux has many (perhaps even most) great voids in the application arena that are unfilled by ANY viable option, be it Free, "Free", Closed, or what have you. Mac, on the other hand, has most of the mainstream applications pretty well covered, especially in the graphics arena. This fact calls into question the viability of Linux as a desktop for the user and also strongly suggests that developers don't believe that there is a sufficiently large market out there for Linux. Ergo, it is reasonable to conclude that Linux is not just as big as Macintosh on the desktop, but is, in fact, much smaller.

KDE vs Gnome doesn't *have* to be a battle

[DunbarTheInept]

I agree wholeheartedly with your KDE/Gnome comment. One nice strength of open source is that people don't go out of their way to make things incompatable just because they can. You can run a Gnome app on KDE desktop, and you can run a KDE app on a Gnome desktop - so you don't *have* to choose one to the exclusion of the other. Mix and match to your heart's content. I prefer the Gnome desktop's look, but I like a lot of the KDE project applications (especially Konqueror). So I run Gnome but roughly 50% of the apps up on my screen at any given time are actually from KDE. This doesn't have to be a holy war - the technologies are not mutually exclusive in the way that closed source guis tend to be.

secure mail : APOP

[linuxlover]

One thing I hate about POP is it sends out my password in cleartext across the 'oh so safe Internet'. This is why I am all for APOP.

Said that, there are very few clients that do APOP and fewer ISPs that offer APOP! The ones with CObalt raq servers default to apop. which is why I am with a cobalt server provider.

Clients that support apop
- sylpheed
- evolution
- not sure about kmail.

clients that allow me to store mails in 'mh' format (not that treded MBOX format)
- evolution
- sylpheed

Right now I am with sylpheed. It is good. But I can use something more polished and has
- intergrated addressbook
- organizer
- palm
support. Which brings me to evolution.

So far everytime I start evolution it hangs / crashes. One time it managed to survive but scanned some sensitive ports on my ISP and triggered portsentry :-)

I am really looking forward to the final version which has pilot support

Gee, another dumb Outlook clone...

[aquarian]

Whoopie. Now, how about some fresh thinking?

I prefer Linux

[matty]

Thus I find it hard to believe that most people can get away with, never mind prefer, using Linux in lieu of Windows or Macintosh.

I use Debian 2.2r4 at home (I do dual-boot to Win98SE to play Descent3, MechWarrior3 and the demos off my PC Gamer CD) exclusively for email, web, letters, etc. I also use it at work exclusively. OpenOffice allows me to interact with MS Office and everything else just works.

All the other computers in the office run some version of Windows (except the server, which is also Debian).

Not only do I "get away with it", I definitely prefer it. Windows drives me up the wall when I try to use it (except for web-browsing. Mozilla0.9.5 is very good, but it still doesn't quite match IE5.5sp2, IMO).

My parents also use Debian on their computer, since they got tired of Win95 crashing on their old computer, and didn't want to spend an extra $180 when I built them their new one 2 years ago. My mom types letters just fine in Abiword, and they use Mozilla for web browsing and to access their hotmail account (I know, but they're loathe to change).

Plus, I have 2 other friends who use Linux exclusively, although they are both uber-geeks. One of them is the sysadmin for a small company with 6 locations and about 30 total employess. They use Debian exclusively, including custom Java apps and a custom scheduling/billing server setup with PostgreSQL (sp?) and they use Squirrel Mail for webmail.

So, yes, some of us definitely prefer Linux.

inconsistency is not applicable for groups

[David Jao]

Many die-hard Linux advocates claim that the fact that MS still holds the desktop for the foreseeable future is irrelevant. Yet the way projects like this are being touted whenever there is some progress made suggests inconsistency.

Unless you can cite an instance of the same individual espousing both these positions, your claims of inconsistency are invalid.

The slashdot crowd, and the linux community in general, are made up of diverse groups of people with diverse viewpoints. Differences of opinion between members of a large group of people is something to be expected, not derided as "inconsistent".

Crashing problems with mail client

[Anonymous Coward]

Just downloaded the 0.99 version, which represents my first upgrade since the previous major release (beta 5, I think it was). Anyway, the mail is now uncheckable and inaccessible - as soon as you click on it, there is a segmentation fault, and the mail program dies. Calender and contacts still work fine. I am running red hat 7.0.

Has anyone else had this experience? If so, any ideas on how to get it running again?

Re:bloat aka low level languages

[Anonymous Coward]

Lines of code aren't counted that way. The general rule is to count each C++ statement as a SLOC, so that your first example is 1 SLOC no matter which way it is written and your second example is 3 SLOCs no matter which way it is written.

This feature stunned me...

[tarkin]

I got a PDF attachment and evolution (0.15) showed me the PDF inline.
Now that is fucking cool feature !
It could be a problem when somebody sends you a 130 pages long one though ;-)
If they keep adding neat stuff like that , Evolution WILL become THE KILLER app for the linux desktop. Especially if you how well the Palm stuff integrates with it.

Re:This feature stunned me...

[Anonymous Coward]

this has been in kmail FOREVER (well, maybe not forever, but since i've been using kde (2.0)). it works through kghostview embedding

Re:Trial Installs: rdp2vnc

[downwa]

Check out rdp2vnc:

http://www-lce.eng.cam.ac.uk/~tme23/vdesktop/

which can convert the Windows Terminal Server protocol (RDP) to the VNC protocol on the fly, giving you access to multiple client logins on a single server, using VNC, but at Citrix speeds.

No client licenses needed.

Of course, your other options are good too, but add rdp2vnc to the mix and you'll save the last 10% Citrix licenses as well.

Nothing needs to be installed on the server. Just install rdp2vnc on the client, run something like:

rdp2vnc -u username -d DOMAIN your.terminal.server.domain.here

then run:

vncviewer localhost:5923

to get a Windows Terminal Server login.

Cheers,

Warren E. Downs

Re:As someone who has hated Outlook for a long tim

[chetohevia]

We do have namespace.

Select Tools-->Mail Settings, select your IMAP account, click "Edit" and under "Receiving Options" check the "Override Server-Supplied Namespace" button, then enter the namespace you want to use.

You can also use "Tools-->Manage Subscriptions" to control which folders you view in IMAP.

Yours,
Aaron Weber
Ximian, Inc.

Re:As someone who has hated Outlook for a long tim

[mbyte]

Hmm .. a few weeks i did file a bug report about this, and it was commented "feature request", did you include it in the lastest versions ?

~/evolution should be configurable or hidden

[Error27]

The thing that made Unix more pleasing than other operating systems was that its file system had been more cleverly designed.

The creators had the insight to see that users should be given a part of the file system to care for and to tend. That part came to be known as /home/username/ or "home" to the users. As Unix matured users seldom needed to venture into the rest of the filesystem. Eventually with an advanced distribution the only place the users had to visit was /etc. (This directory was an embarassment to the creators).

Although some data files were created in the users' directories to serve them, these files were called dot files and they were not intrusive for users. The visible files were created by the users and pleased the users greatly.

On other operating systems it was not this way. On these operating systems applications saved files in random locations. Executable files were mixed with data files and with libraries, which in turn mixed with other files. And on these operating systems there was no joy; only chaos and gnashing of teeth.

When evolution came it destroyed the beauty that was the Unix filesystem. It created data files and libraries and other files that no one had ever seen before in the users' homes.

Eventually the number of invading files came to outnumber the files that the users had created. Animosity between the two types of files grew until war broke out. The war was bloody and lasted for many years. The users faught bravely but eventually were forced to flee.

The new refugees saved files where ever they could find room. They saved written documents in /var and they saved images in /usr/local. But there was no order to it. Only chaos and fear.

The age of darkness had begun.

Re:print "code"; # please

[be-fan]

!!!

Sorry, I couldn't resist. Even KDE-2 (which IMO is criminally bloated) is about 1.5M lines of code, while GNOME is over 4M lines.

I want a *decent* email client

[horza]

Outlook sucks and it's one thing I hated about Windows. I've tried so many email clients, both on Windows and Linux, and either their user interface is klunky or it's bug-ridden (one wiped all my mail!). The Linux email clients usually had the edge so I used one of these (I have two boxes side by side, one Win2k and one Linux). Then I discovered The Bat!, which I find to be the best by a large margin. It's not free (30-day free trial) but is so worth the money. Hence I was excited when I heard about an advanced email client called Evolution for Gnome... and groaned out loud when I saw it was an Outlook clone. Why???

I don't buy the "it's easier for people to shift from Outlook" argument. I know plenty of non-techies that had no problem switching from Outlook to Eudora. On the other hand it's good there *is* an Outlook clone for those that really want it. Perhaps some ex-Win32 users will find it a comforting stepping stone. The Evolution team are to be congratulated for providing this. Sadly it's not for me.

Phillip.

Re:As someone who has hated Outlook for a long tim

[Anonymous Coward]

Now, first off I should point off that I think that Outlook is terrible and Eudora is an excellent GUI mail client.

However, you seem a bit hypocritical. "Evolution is 'intuitive' because it's like Outlook", "KMail is good because it's like Eudora".

Gimme VM on emacs...

shared libraries (was Re:Good, but why in C?)

[Anonymous Coward]

One good reason to avoid C++: fragile base classes. For this reason, it's highly undesirable to export C++ interfaces from a shared library.
OO is nice, but every developer should have some conception of how hir code will compile at a very low level.

Learn how C++ creates virtual function tables, and the way it indexes through them to call virtual functions from classes. See how it accomplishes function overloading through name mangling. Ever notice how each new type you pass into a template creates a new copy of the code? Now go learn some other OO language, like Objective-C (which is also part of gcc, and doesn't have the same problems, though it's not as typesafe, and it is inefficient), or something.

I didn't mean to turn this into a rant, but FBCs are (in my opinion) a crippling shortcoming in C++, and I thought the point bore mentioning.

Ahhh!

[Anonymous Coward]

Ahh man, you beat me too it! I call first flame on his next post!

Read a few of the other responses to my posting...

[cnelzie]

...I posted so that I could expand my knowledge on the subject. I mentioned what I believed to be the truth and then stated that I am no expert on the matter hoping that someone that is more knowledgeable on the subject would post a proper response for me.

They did.

--
.sig seperator
--

Re:As someone who has hated Outlook for a long tim

[fejjie]

Frankly, I don't see the difference between the UI's of all these mail clients. They all have a folder bar, they all have a message list, they all have a preview pane, and they all have a menu/toolbar at the top. Honestly, how can Eudora's UI be any better than Outlooks? Or vise versa even...they look the same to me. In fact every mail client looks the same to me. I think I need to stop writing mail clients...

aargh

[einhverfr]

What the parent did not tell you is that although you CAN install GNOME on Windows, it requires compiling many many source packages and maybe even modifying them to make up for API's that cygwin has not implimented yet, like setlocal or getopts. Have fun debugging...

Fortunately most of those API lines can simply be commented out if you don't mind losing localization and command-line options... I might have to write my own getotps function :(

Re:aargh

[Sleepy]

Yes, you need to modify a few packages to get them to compile under Cygwin. The link I provided (to .jp) seems to have great documentation on the subject... take a look, it's probably what you're looking for.

KDE 1.x has ready-made packages for Cygwin, and installs painlessly (I've run it for the hey-look-at-this factor). I wish someone could do the same with Gnome 1.4.

Re:bloat aka low level languages

[doubtme]

One very important thing to remember about code size is that LOC is a very good indicator of # of bugs. Reducing the number of lines of code (obviously without reducing functionality) is a good way to reduce # of bugs, and also to make your hackers more productive.

Yup, that's one of the fundamental constants of software engineering, the other is:
"Time to write a line of code is constant"

In other words:
Bugs/LOC = k
Time/LOC = k

Reducing the number of LOC you have to write is therefore a good thing on two counts - less time writing, less time debugging + more stable apps.

And no, you can't argue with the SE weenies on this one - it's been shown to be true a million times over.*

* Caveat: k is different for different people, different measurement systems etc. Obviously.

Evolution

[Anonymous Coward]

I haven't really figured out the "groupware" part of Evolution. To me it's just personal calendar/mail.
Does it come with server daemon to share e.g. calendars and resources (conference rooms etc.) like, let's say, Lotus Notes?

Interface punditry

[hey!]

I've seen the site you link before.

However, unlike you I don't get all my information from semi-informed Internet rants. I actually prefer to observe software in action.

It's true that Notes suffers from the same interface wackiness that generally afflicted all Lotus applications. Many of their dialog boxes are textbook examples on how NOT do design dialogs. However users get over its idiosyncracies pretty fast if the system is properly deployed and administered. The majority of UI issues really are more fodder for bellyaching UI purists than a real problem.

The "Hall of Shame" people are pretty much just uninformed, self appointed interface pundits. I think they have a number of good points, but they are also ridiculously ignorant on others. For example, the Notes password dialog box obscures the number of letters in your password; as you type each letter, a random number of "X" appear on the password line. Here is what they have to say about this:

This is not the login window for a weapons targeting system; it is an e-mail application. We wish the designers had spent their time improving the usability of the application itself rather than wasting it on useless diversions.

First of all, I have never heard one user complain about this; it turns out what matters to users is the response of the system to each keystroke, not the count of characters. Users are initially surprised by this, but they get over it immediately. Secondly, exactly what e-mail system are people in charge of targeting weapons supposed to use? Don't you think they might need to protect their passwords? Don't you suppose that they (and other people like financial auditors or intelligence analysts) might need an e-mail system with a high degree of security built in from the start? My third point bears on the second. Notes is not an e-mail system. It is a secure platform for managing the handling and flow of potentially sensitive documents within and between organizations.

E-mail is just another one of these kinds of applications. The Notes e-mail application is written entirely within Notes, and you can create your own applications that move documents around in secure way with the same properly managed trust relationships and authentication and documentation features that Notes mail has. Notes is stupendous overkill for just simple, non-secure e-mail using commodity protocols. Like all overkill applications, there is a certain amount of headache involved with getting the added benefits of features you don't use.

In other words, you should use Notes for the purposes it was intended for, and hire clue-ful administrators who can run the system properly. If you don't need the power of Notes, then hiring and training these people is a waste. Even with them, you have to live with the fact you are hooking up two architecturally different systems to exchange information when you just use Notes for non-secure commodity protocol e-mail. So, I wouldn't recommend Notes for companies looking for a simple MTA/MDA. It will never be a best of breed solution in that space. However, companies way underestimate their need to handle documents in ways that provide security, revision control, review, and authentication.

There are some other examples where these folks have applied a very shallow level of analysis. I won't defend the Notes UI as a whole, which I dislike, but the "Hall of Shame" people have nothing in particular to be proud of. I don't see any of their perfectly designed applications taking the world by storm. Avoiding UI blunders is important, but also getting things right is arguably just as important.

Re:Interface punditry

[Loundry]

However, unlike you I don't get all my information from semi-informed Internet rants. I actually prefer to observe software in action.

You call the criticisms of Lotus Notes on iarchitect.com "semi-informed." This is an ad hominem on both me and also on iarchitect.com. Your argument sucks from the get-go.

Furthermore, I was a daily user of that piece of trash "Lotus Notes" for over a year, so your claim that I don't prefer to see software in action is rubbish.

However users get over its idiosyncracies pretty fast if the system is properly deployed and administered.

Does Lotus include this truth in their marketing material? How fast is "pretty fast"? That does amount to training, which is a cost for companies.

The "Hall of Shame" people are pretty much just uninformed, self appointed interface pundits.

Even more ad hominems.

Now, you actually chose to challenge one of the problems that iarchitect broght up, and that was about the password entry screen. Iarchitect.com's criticism was valid: why waste time programming a fancy interface to password entry when the programmers could have improved one of thousands of horrible parts of the interface? Here are your defenses:

First of all, I have never heard one user complain about this;

Non sequitur. Did Iarchitect.com ever claim that a user would? Of course not! They were criticizing the developers of Notes for not perfecting something of much higher importance! (Namely, the immeasurably shitty Notes UI.)

Secondly, exactly what e-mail system are people in charge of targeting weapons supposed to use?

Any email application they want! Can you point to any evidence that suggests that the uselessly-fancy password entry dialog of Notes was necessary for those people who are in charge of targeting weapons?

Notes is not an e-mail system. It is a secure platform for managing the handling and flow of potentially sensitive documents within and between organizations.

This is interesting, and attempts to answer the question: "What the hell is Lotus Notes?" You'll get completely different answers, depending on who you ask! Here's some more answers given by Notes developers:

• The product is actually a sophisticated non-relational database environment that also provides a rather limited e-mail functionality.
  
• It's not just a mail program like ccMail, but a (said in one breath) document-based-development-platform-with-integrate d-mail-features.
  
• Notes is an applications development environment for tools that facilitate the open exchange of information between geographically dispersed individuals.
  
• Notes is a workflow application
  
• It is a workflow collaboration software [sic].
  
• Louts Notes is not first an email system but rather, a distributed client/server development and deployment environment.
  
• It is NOT an e-mail client, it's a database-manager
  

Your definition, along with all the other gobbledygook definitions above, were given in the full knowledge that most people who use Notes use Notes for email.

In other words, you should use Notes for the purposes it was intended for, and hire clue-ful administrators who can run the system properly. If you don't need the power of Notes, then hiring and training these people is a waste.

And yet many companies have bought Notes for the sole purpose of running it for email. If this cannot be chalked up to deceptive marketing, then what might the reason be?

There are some other examples where these folks have applied a very shallow level of analysis. I won't defend the Notes UI as a whole, which I dislike, but the "Hall of Shame" people have nothing in particular to be proud of. I don't see any of their perfectly designed applications taking the world by storm.

This is a tu quoque argument.

Overall, your argument totally sucks, and my point stands. Collaborative software depends on a good UI, and Lotus Notes is the pinnacle of horrible UI design. It is wrong to uphold Notes as an example of good collaborative software for this very reason. I offered as evidence for my claim the many points made by iarchitect.com in its in-depth analysis of Lotus Notes. Instead of countering any of these claims, you responded with multiple ad hominems, a non-sequitur, and a tu quoque, none of which have anything to do with whether or not the inteface to Notes sucks (which it does, big time).

In fact, you state:

I won't defend the Notes UI as a whole, which I dislike

In other words, you are actually agreeing with me! Now, do you agree with me that in order for collaborative software to be "a good example of collaborative software", then it would need to have a good UI?

Re:Interface punditry

[hey!]

bEven more ad hominems.

No, I'm arguing they are wrong because their opinions are uniformed. If I was arguing their opinions were uniformed because they were wrong headed, that would be an ad hominem. Naturally you can turn any argument inside out to make it a non-sequitur.

Furthermore, I was a daily user of that piece of trash "Lotus Notes" for over a year, so your claim that I don't prefer to see software in action is rubbish.

May I ask what you use it for? Just e-mail? If so then you haven't seen Notes in action. You will note that I said that Notes is not all that good when used just for commodity e-mail.

Me:First of all, I have never heard one user complain about this;

You:Non sequitur. Did Iarchitect.com ever claim that a user would


Well, let me elaborate and you can tell me if this point is a non-sequitur. The feature we are talking about exists for a reason. Since it exists for a reason, and no actual users complain about it, how then can it reasonably be called a defect? These people are setting, in this one case at least, their personal taste above the needs of real users.

Any email application they want! Can you point to any evidence that suggests that the uselessly-fancy password entry dialog of Notes was necessary for those people who are in charge of targeting weapons?

Of course a uselessly-fancy password box would be as you say. But here you are falling into the same trap the iarchitect people have: the fact that a feature is not important to you doesn't mean it is not important to everybody. The feature is there because the CIA used Notes for e-mail and other purposes. It is there to keep people from surreptitiously figuring out how long somebody's pasword is by looking over their shoulder or using surveillance equipment. This is not a hypothetical threat for many people. Personally, I don't know the requirements of people who launch missles, but it was the IArchitect who brought up this example as a way of rhetorically saying nobody needs this much security in an e-mail application. My guess is that people who exchange information about missile attack plans want to keep their passwords as secure as possible.

This is interesting, and attempts to answer the question: "What the hell is Lotus Notes?" You'll get completely different answers, depending on who you ask!

What is wrong with this? The examples you give go on to support my claim, that Notes is a powerful groupware application platform. They are all more or less consistent with each other. Their only fault is that they don't agree with what you think the product should be, and therefore you have labelled them "gobbledygook".

Your definition, along with all the other gobbledygook definitions above, were given in the full knowledge that most people who use Notes use Notes for email.

You are straying off the point here. My point is that Notes provides groupware capabilities beyond e-mail. Your point that most people who use Notes use it exclusively for e-mail. If this were true (which I don't know since I don't know of any surveys to support this one way or the other), it would simply be irrelevant. Many people have used crescent wrenches as a hammer in a pinch. If it slips and bends a nail, do we banish it from our toolbox?

And yet many companies have bought Notes for the sole purpose of running it for email. If this cannot be chalked up to deceptive marketing, then what might the reason be?

Do I detect a bit of well poisoning going on here? ;-) Actually, I'd turn this argument on its head. Notes has capabilities that other systems (notably exchange) cannot match. Therefore the competition has promoted the view that "it's all just e-mail." Then customers who are confused by this buy themselves an aircraft carrier when they really just want a rubber dinghy. I think you have bought into this confusion, and probably you don't like Notes because as an e-mail system it is intrinsically overcomplicted (besides its more superficial faults). However, when you actually see Notes in action doing what it supposed to do, you can better grasp what things are there for a reason and which ones are simply sloppy.

Me:I don't see any of their perfectly designed applications taking the world by storm.

You:
This is a tu quoque argument.

Once again, it is not tu quoque because I am not arguing my specific point from this. It really is a new point, about the value of interface punditry of this sort. I think it has some value, but the viewpoint it that produces it should be distrusted. In part my view on this is the hostility of the apostate. I used to be a UI purist too, but one day I woke up and realized that people like me were do nothing to make the world better. We weren't convincing people to write software our way, we weren't helping other people make their software better; and we weren't developing alternatives to the software we were criticizing. We were just wallowing in our own superiority. Look at the way they selectively pull out quotes from people that disagree with them, just for the purpose of knocking them down, not from actually learning from something they might have to say.

Overall, your argument totally sucks, and my point stands.

Not really. Here was your "point":

It is not fair to call Lotus Notes groupware. It is more fair to call it "The Worst Software Ever Written."

My point is that while Notes has serious user interface flaws, it also has capabilities beyond other applications which are attempting to support group collaboration. New attempts to create software should replicate the capabilities without the unessential flaws. I believe I have made my point, but that you did not make yours, unless it is you hate the software (which is your right) so much that you can't see any strengths it might have.

Collaborative software depends on a good UI, and Lotus Notes is the pinnacle of horrible UI design.

Here I can speak from some experience in having developed, deployed and supported collaborative software. All software benefits from a good UI. However no software has a perfect UI, and the flaws and strengths of the UI are just part of the whole picture. Security, for example, is another very important part, and it is one which Notes gets very high marks on. As for Notes being the pinnacle of horrible UI, this is simply hyperbole.

I offered as evidence for my claim the many points made by iarchitect.com in its in-depth analysis of Lotus Notes.

The problem in your argument is not in iarchitect.com, which while flawed has good points to make as well. The problem is in how you are using their work. For details read on.

In other words, you are actually agreeing with me!

As much as I would like to agree with you, I think it would be more accurate to say I agree with some of your premises, but I don't agree with your conclusions because other of your premises are too vague to agree with or refute.

Now, do you agree with me that in order for collaborative software to be "a good example of collaborative software", then it would need to have a good UI?

Here is the crux of the matter. What is a good UI? It isn't as easy a question as you seem to think. What is an easy question is, "What is a perfect UI?" A perfect UI never confuses the user, provides him with exactly the information he needs when he needs it, and responds to the tasks he wishes to perform without any thought.

Since no software yet created is like this, the question becomes, what is good enough to work?

I know Notes is good enough to work, because I have developed workflow applications in Notes that have been used by ordinary, non-guru computer people successfully. They managed to navigate all the various idiosyncracies of the Notes UI which offend purists.

However I don't think that "good enough to work" is really "good enough" in the sense of a reasonable place to stop. The very sloppiness of many of the UI glitches in Notes is inexcusable. However, this shouldn't blind us to understanding the system as a whole, and appreciating the things it gets right. All the more so in the context of considering what new competitive software should be able to achieve.

The hard part was finding out what the software do

[martial]

I saw the news and went to the web page .. ok cool but no description of "what" it does

Then I try to see the gnome website to know what the software is about ... same result ... a change list ... no info on "what" it is

So I finaly end up on freshmeat who tells me the software is "the GNOME mailer, calendar, contact manager, and communications tool" ... well now I know ... but sorry to say that it could have been useful to get some info about it in the articles ...

Re:Trial Installs: rdp2vnc

[Anonymous Coward]

WTS/Citrix certainly requires seat licences (except for admin mode). That doesn't mean you have to pay them, but don't misrepresent the utility of this stuff.

um, where'z sticky notes?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, this might be a silly question as I don't use Gnome really, but shouldn't Evolution have "sticky notes" as an option (a la Outlook, etc?)

If not - why not? is there something in Gnome I'm missing? And why wouldn't it still be saved alongside other Evolution information for convenience?

Please don't kill me, I know it's an ignorant question, but after looking around a bit, I haven't found the answer as yet.

Re:As someone who has hated Outlook for a long tim

[chetohevia]

I'm not sure-- As far as I can tell, it's been there for quite some time.

May have been misfiled. Sorry for the confusion.