Slashdot Mirror
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.
Does 700,000 lines of code seem a little bloated to anyone else? I guess it is suppose to do everything (kitchen sink included)..........
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
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.
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.
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).
this is getting old and so are you
blog
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*.
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.
until (succeed) try { again(); }
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.
-dr. layyze f. tooth PhD
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?
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?
I know I'll get flogged for this. But, is there any chance of running this in win32?
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...
Blink
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.
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
stty erase ^H
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.
The scalloped tatters of the King in Yellow must cover
Yhtill forever. (R. W. Chambers, the King in Yellow
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.
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.
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.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
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.
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
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.