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

Full annoucement here

[savaget]

Full annoucement here

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: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.

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). ;-)

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..