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Evolution 1.5 has Been Released

SirPrize writes "As announced here, Evolution 1.5 is now available for download (obligatory screenshots, for those who want to click and see)" Congrats to all the developers responsible for this gigantic undertaking.

68 of 317 comments (clear)

  1. Coming up real good. by Shivaji+Maharaj · · Score: 2, Informative

    I have been trying the beta stuff on gentoo and works pretty fine. Good work.. keep it up.!!

    --
    We do not have a history of profitable operations. Our future SCOsource licensing revenue is uncertain.
  2. Dinner by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Screenshot 2

    If you need a PIM to remind you to eat dinner, you have serious issues.

    1. Re:Dinner by Flabby+Boohoo · · Score: 4, Funny

      True... how about a reminder to take a shower instead?

    2. Re:Dinner by TechnoVooDooDaddy · · Score: 4, Interesting

      around my company, if you don't put lunch & dinner on your calendar and mark it "private appointment" chances are good some schmuck will try and schedule a meeting or a conference call or something during that time...

    3. Re:Dinner by boinger · · Score: 4, Interesting
      I have serious issues, then.

      My company, the godsend that it is, buys food for any employee who wants it, but the order can be in no later than 5:20p. (We get to order off or an actual menu from an actual restaurant)

      So, I have a Calendar alert pop up daily at 4:55p, or I'd miss out (very often, in fact). I don't get hungry until 6:00p or so, so I have to visually remind myself to order if I *think* I'll still be here at 6:30p (when the food arrives)

      I know it was meant as funny, but it is useful for people like me who can forget to pee for 6 hours because their brain is 'on a roll' with soemthing.

      --
      Send your friends messages of love at fuck-you.org
    4. Re:Dinner by Tim+C · · Score: 2, Interesting

      And in my company, where we're *required* to put lunch in our calendar if we're planning on not being at our desks for it, some schmuck will *still* schedule a meeting during that time.

    5. Re:Dinner by deadlinegrunt · · Score: 3, Funny

      Nah, those are the days he plans to have dinner with his mistress. Of course, he won't put that in the planner in case wifey peeks over his shoulder...

      Or perhaps there is bigger plan at play here to make his wife think he is with his mistress and his mistress think he his with his wife therefore leaving even more time for coding!

      --
      BSD is designed. Linux is grown. C++ libs
    6. Re:Dinner by banzai75 · · Score: 2, Funny

      That's why I found that 8-hour lunch breaks work the best for me.

  3. Java Desktop by gbjbaanb · · Score: 2, Interesting

    You'd think Sun'd sponsor them a little wouldn't you? What they're doing helps Sun's push for their desktop one hell of a lot.

    1. Re:Java Desktop by Delirium+Tremens · · Score: 2, Informative

      I believe Sun has been adding friendly cut-and-paste to their own Evolution version. Let's see if Ximian wants to integrate those changes back into the main product.

    2. Re:Java Desktop by racer7890 · · Score: 2, Funny

      Well Sun's Java Desktop is based on SuSE Linux, SuSE will shortly be owned by Novell, Novell owns Ximian, Ximian created Evolution. Therefore Sun is supporting Evolution. :)

  4. As an Evolution user for about a year... by tcopeland · · Score: 2, Informative
    ....I must say, woo-hoo! Evolution is great stuff; it truly is an Outlook killer.

    Also, here's a duplicate code report, thanks to CPD. I like the comment on the first duplicate code chunk:
    /* sigh, so much for oo code reuse ... */
    /* FIXME: put in a function */
    Heh.
    1. Re:As an Evolution user for about a year... by the-matt-mobile · · Score: 4, Insightful

      it truly is an Outlook killer

      I'm not trying to troll here, as I think Evolution is a wonderful product... but I'd just like to dispute your claim on one of the finer points - nothing will be an "Outlook Killer" until it runs everywhere that Outlook runs (ie: Windows).

    2. Re:As an Evolution user for about a year... by SubtleNuance · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Evolution will (shortly) be a very capable PIM. With an OS backend of somekind for scheduling, will cover 95% of the "outlook" users needs. But, Outlook does something that no GNU/Linux PIM does yet these form things.
      Now, Im not trying to say "outlook r0x0r2 and evolution 6r00l2" or somesuch, so please ease up on the "M$ shill" retorts (and the 'outlook is insecure' w/ vb" stuff as well.

      What you can do is send forms, with send a form to a user like an email -- the 'form' appears in their inbox). This form, can do whatever you'd like. You can build work-chain dependant systems with them.

      Now, I imagine you can do similar via HTML forms and a Apache backend, but ive used these outlook forms before to enable some 'officialdom' instead of attached emails and forms.... and they worked pretty nice. (i built a simple form that made 'offical' communication between two departments and tracked the sending/recieving and reaction -- pretty simple) its pretty interesting.

    3. Re:As an Evolution user for about a year... by Jellybob · · Score: 3, Informative
      it lacks the same kind of integration that Outlook/Exchange offer medium and large corporations wanting to standardize on an e-mail, calendar and messaging suite can.

      *cough* connector *cough*
    4. Re:As an Evolution user for about a year... by damiangerous · · Score: 4, Informative

      Try using MultiSync with the SynCE plugin.

    5. Re:As an Evolution user for about a year... by JohnFluxx · · Score: 2, Interesting

      zope?

      Personally we used eclipse+tomcat+struts. It's been working well so far.
      The only reason zope was turned down was because of lack of integrated java support. (Personally I'm not convinced that that is a problem...)

  5. Groupwise Plugin? by mr_lithic · · Score: 2
    I thought that this version was going to include support for Groupwise?

    Novell was trumpeting this as their Linux Mail Client on Ximian.

  6. Gentoo Users by peterprior · · Score: 2, Informative

    Ebuilds for evolution 1.5 are on breakmygentoo.net

  7. S/MIME support? by Cthefuture · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Is S/MIME support new for this release? I poked around on the site some and it looks like it is but I couldn't find any more information about it.

    How are certificates and keys managed? Does it (hopefully) use a PKCS#11 module like Mozilla?

    I don't know why more stuff doesn't use S/MIME early on. PGP/GPG and the others are not really standard and don't work off-the-shelf with a lot of big software (Mozilla and Outlook being two of them).

    --
    The ratio of people to cake is too big
    1. Re:S/MIME support? by lordholm · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Yes, hardware support seem to be missing. This isn't good, I want to use the Swedish postal services electronic ids (smart-card based) since the S/MIME support in this would allow me to sign LEGALLY BINDING contracts via e-mail.

      Then I don't have to meet a person in real life... ever : )

      --
      "Civis Europaeus sum!"
  8. If we're gonna get news like this... by Raleel · · Score: 5, Insightful

    How about at least mentioning what features are new?

    --
    -- Who is the bigger fool? The fool or the fool who follows him? --
    1. Re:If we're gonna get news like this... by JerkBoB · · Score: 2, Funny

      I've never heard of Evolution, and had to dig around a bit to discover that it's a PIM.

      Have you been living under a rock for the last three years?

      --
      A host is a host from coast to coast...
      Unless it's down, or slow, or fails to POST!
  9. Re:Hmm. Time for another trial by Malc · · Score: 4, Interesting

    You don't use Outlook enough. Ever had to run the scanpst.exe utility? When I hit the "Send/Receive" button in Outlook XP at the moment, I get a dialog saying "The operation failed". The other day I ran into a whole bunch of issues when one of my folders that mailing list messages filters to hit 64Ki messages.

  10. Fedora Core 1 not supported by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I tried installing it just now. Their install program says it does not recognize my distribution .. and will not let me install

    I am using Fedora Core 1

  11. Developer release? by Delirium+Tremens · · Score: 3, Informative
    From the announcement:

    The main purpose of this release is, of course, to gather as much testing as possible from users.

    So is Evolution 1.5 a development release? Are they following the same numbering scheme as the Linux kernel? So does that mean that if I am not in a testing mood, I should rather wait for 1.6?

    1. Re:Developer release? by irix · · Score: 4, Informative

      So is Evolution 1.5 a development release? Are they following the same numbering scheme as the Linux kernel?

      Yes and yes.

      If you don't want to be testing 1.5 then you should be waiting for a stable 2.0. Of course, if you can, testing 1.5 is a good thing.

      --

      Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
  12. What's the big excitement? by milgr · · Score: 5, Informative

    This is a development release. According to evolution's planned milestones, the stable 1.6 release will be out in March.

    Like the kernel, the odd dot releases are development.

    That said, I choose to use evolution 1.4 for most of my email needs.

    --
    Where law ends, tyranny begins -- William Pitt
  13. This is a testing release by irix · · Score: 5, Informative

    This is one of the Evolution testing releases that go along with Gnome 2.5. The goal is a stable Evolution 2.0 and Gnome 2.6 later in the spring. Check out he roadmap.

    So by all means, pick up 1.5 if you want to help with bug fixing, but this is not a "stable" release.

    --

    Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
  14. OK this is lame but..... by Coaster-Sj · · Score: 2, Funny

    So Evolution has evolved....

    --
    "Average intelligence is pretty damn stupid"
  15. I still think... by cK-Gunslinger · · Score: 5, Insightful

    .. that one of the oft-overlooked facilitators of open-source software is having a Windows client. Mozilla/Firebird/Thunderbird seem to understand this, as well as tons of other projects. I am almost at a point where I could switch from Win2k to any flavor of Linux and still use the same apps 90% of the time. (Thunderbird, OO.org, Thunderbird, Gimp, Eclipse, etc)

    I don't pretend to understand the intricacies of Evolution and why it may be impossible to run on Windows, but I think that if it were possible, it would be a large boon to the project.

    1. Re:I still think... by cK-Gunslinger · · Score: 3, Interesting


      Uh, no. I would like to think the purpose of releasing OS software for Windows is not to "make a clone," but rather to "supply the same functionality in an application that is open, standards-compliant, and similiar in appearance/use."

      A lot of open source developers have the attitude of "anything you can do, we can do better." And this is a good thing. You wouldn't say, "Why run Firebird on Windows? It's just a IE clone, run the real thing," now would you?

  16. Ximian Connector by Chuck+Bucket · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Is there ANY way to try out the Ximian Connector before buying it? I can't convince my company to buy it for me, even though I'm on a Linux workstation running all of the *nix boxes in house. (I run rdesktop to connect to a win box to check my email via Outlook - which is a waste). I want to try it, and would gladly buy it myself if I thought it worked fine. Or, can anyone testify to it's usefulness? Evoltion has come such a long way in the past year, I really want to start using that fulltime.

    CB

    1. Re:Ximian Connector by tita · · Score: 2, Informative

      Call them up and ask them for a tryout version. A coworker of mine did that and Ximian (was still ximian back then) just gave him a version to test.

      --
      "Who wishes to be creative, must first destroy and smash accepted values." - Nietzsche
  17. Remote calendar support? by IGnatius+T+Foobar · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Evolution is truly a first class application. Polished, debugged, good-looking, and professional.

    That having been said, though, I am still disappointed by the fact that they are not supporting remote calendars out of the box. Sure, you can buy plugins to connect it to Exchange, or Netscape/iPlanet/SunONE/JES calendar server (whatever they're calling it this week), and presumably Groupwise (soon) ... but where's the built-in support for remote calendars using an open protocol? Folks like me who are developing open source groupware servers are anxiously awaiting good clientware to connect to. How about putting WCAP in the standard build? It's well-documented and much simpler than the disgusting mess the IETF is proposing (CAP has the dubious honor of being the one protocol even uglier than IMAP).

    So how about it, codemonkeys? The sooner we get some real open source calendaring going, the sooner we can start to make a real challenge to Outlook. Microsoft loves the Outlook/Exchange lock-in. They love it so much that they're trying to do the same thing across their entire product line (Office 2003 has many ties to SharePoint server). The window of opportunity is open, but it won't be forever.

    --
    Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
  18. Evolution 1.5 Screens by breman · · Score: 3, Informative
  19. bayesian spam filter? by pyros · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Anyone know when that is going to be added. I remember seeing some posts about getting started on it on the developer mailing list after 1.4 was released, but I don't see mention of it.

    1. Re:bayesian spam filter? by illusion_2K · · Score: 2, Informative

      While this isn't a feature of Evolution per-se, you can integrate bogofilter into it pretty easily. I use it myself and other than a bunch of false positives from a few mailing lists, it's great.

    2. Re:bayesian spam filter? by ewtrowbr · · Score: 2, Informative

      bogofilter does a wonderful job of plugging into Evolution via the filters. You can match any header string in the inbound email and pipe the mail through bogofilter. A later filter takes anything labeled as spam, and sends it to the spam folder. I catch 90-95% of my spam that way. and I have NEVER had a false positive.

  20. Re:Hmm. Time for another trial by Space+cowboy · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Well, I dunno about that, not that I'm defending Outlook at all - virus-prone piece of sh1t that it is, but since I use POP, I get the same email (in the office) as I do at home.

    What I like about Mozilla is the spam filter - fantastic. In the morning I spend 5 minutes filtering mail in outlook, only about 10 seconds in Mozilla. On average I get maybe 400 emails per day, of which about 300-350 are spam. That's because I'm the 'catchall' for the domains though...

    If people didn't send me bloody word documents, I'd ditch windows immediately, but Open Office and abiword aren't up to standard yet, for documents that I get sent...

    Simon

    --
    Physicists get Hadrons!
  21. Re:woohoo! by grub · · Score: 5, Funny


    What the fuck is "evolution"?

    Apparently something your murky area of the genetic pond stopped doing generations ago.

    --
    Trolling is a art,
  22. for single users, not enterprises by axxackall · · Score: 2, Insightful
    ....I must say, woo-hoo! Evolution is great stuff; it truly is an Outlook killer.

    Excuse me, Outlook per se is close to useless without Exchange server. Sure, Evolution works fine with IMAP. It even works with LDAP to keep Contacts (although that piece is not fine).

    But how about Calendaring and Tasks being stored on the server *AND* processed with the server? In Outlook when I appoint the meeting ti automatically checks if the attendee is busy or not, and it ch checks it on the server - not in my personal folders.

    Without groupware-based calendaring Outlook is useless for most of enterprises.

    --

    Less is more !
    1. Re:for single users, not enterprises by Zak3056 · · Score: 2, Informative

      But how about Calendaring and Tasks being stored on the server *AND* processed with the server?

      Evolution talks to Exchange, though you have to pay Ximian a license fee for the Exchange connector, and still have to pay Microsoft for the Exchange CAL. I find that to be financially not practical at the moment, and don't see how anyone could convince their management to move into such a scenario, but the option IS there.

      --
      What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
  23. Re:Won't be going anywhere near my systems... by tero · · Score: 2, Informative
    As long time mutt user I agree with your sentiments, however I'm quite sure Evolution (and similar 'bloated' applications) are needed if Linux ever wants to take over the corporate desktop world.

    I also agree the it would be nice to have a separate Gnome calendar (i.e KDE's Organizer, or whatever it was called) but in the mean while Mozilla Calendar looks quite good...

  24. Re:Won't be going anywhere near my systems... by ambrosius27 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    One of the main goals of the Evolution 5.x/2.0 release is to better separate the different modules, so that separate mail, calendar, task, and contact programs will be much, much easier. The frontend/backend split (i.e. Evolution and evolution-data-server) and simplified APIs will help in this regard, as will the deprecation of the tree-view side-panel. The Evolution hackers are also toying with making stand-alone shells for the calendar, task, contact, and email programs. With the new structure, such separation should be much simpler.

    Cheers!

    --

    ~~~~~~~~~
    dissertus scribendo latine videri volo.
  25. Feature Request by timothyf · · Score: 4, Insightful

    http://www.research.ibm.com/remail/

    In my opinion, borrowing ideas like that for a groupware/email client would be what distinguishes Evolution from the competition.

    Oh, and pretty please make a Winders version for those of us that are stuck here? :)

  26. Re:Hmm. Time for another trial by Theatetus · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Say it quietly, but through all my trials of mail on Linux, Outlook has just worked

    You've never supported Outlook for others, I take it? It does several weird things with POP3. Take, for instance, this recent problem I've been having where Outlook thinks that a messages is 48KB in size when in fact it's only 46KB. It downloads the 46KB, doesn't get any more for that message, tries again, and again, and again, until it chokes and dies. This one guy had 500Megs of that one message in his inbox, and it never even got removed from the server (neither did anything past it). This is probably the POP server's "fault" (they use Post.Office... *shudder*), but the MDA should definitely be able to handle a fault like that.

    Anyways, I'm not bashing Outlook in particular (I think on the whole the Office line is Microsoft's best work), I just find it odd that people are totally used to the bugs in Microsoft programs but think that equally annoying but different bugs somehow bar Linux from the desktop.

    --
    All's true that is mistrusted
  27. Kernel numbering! it's a devel release! by luge · · Score: 3, Informative

    Since the article makes this totally,totally unclear, this is not a stable release. It's a totally devel, in many ways broken, release. Could eat your mail, pets, family, etc. So only download/install if you are brave. Or stupid. Or something. The stable release will go out with GNOME 2.6 in the spring, or at least that is the current plan. Hope that clarifies...

    --

    IAAL,BIANLY

  28. Built-in spam filtering? by FattMattP · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Does anyone know if there are plans to add built-in spam filtering like Mozilla has? Right now everyone says to use spamassassin but that doesn't work for some people that I know that user Evolution. They want something built in to the client end.

    --
    Prevent email address forgery. Publish SPF records for y
    1. Re:Built-in spam filtering? by NT_blows · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Huh? Run Spamassassin as a daemon (ie spamd) for speed and use Evolution's builtin filtering tool to define a pipe to shell command filter (ie spamc -c) with the rule being if does not return 0, either move to your spam folder or just delete it. Make sure bayesian filtering is enabled in spamassassin, do some training via sa-learn, add you will have great spam filtering with very low overhead.

    2. Re:Built-in spam filtering? by FattMattP · · Score: 4, Informative
      Run Spamassassin as a daemon (ie spamd) for speed and use Evolution's builtin filtering tool to define a pipe to shell command filter (ie spamc -c) with the rule being if does not return 0, either move to your spam folder or just delete it. Make sure bayesian filtering is enabled in spamassassin, do some training via sa-learn, add you will have great spam filtering with very low overhead.
      They need something intergrated into the application so that they can click a "spam" or "not spam" button and/or change spam settings from within Evolution. See Mozilla Mail to see what I am talking about. Your solution still requires interacting with the shell (something these users don't know how to do) to change settings or train the bayesian filter. Right now I already have spamassassin checking mail on the server side.
      --
      Prevent email address forgery. Publish SPF records for y
  29. pgp by SupahVee · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The real question I have for the developers is this: when will we ever see decent PGP/GPG support for Evolution? It's hand-down the most feature complete email app available for GNU/Linux, and yet, still can't do PGP even half as good as Pine, Kmail, Enigmail. The only time I get a PGP'ed email that I can read is ONLY if it was sent by another evolution client, which sounds more like the behavior I would expect from LookOut. Hell, the only way I've gotten decent GPG support for Evo is to have Pine reading a folder where I filter encrypted messages into, Pine reads them just fine, Evolution can't. I've looked through all the features that will supposedly be in the 2.0 release, and nowhere is there mentioned any fix of the PGP handling. I don't pretend to know more than the developers, and I'm sure there may be reasons why they've chosen to leave this feature broken, but if every other OSS Email project can nail it, why can't they?

    --
    "See, we plan ahead! That way, we never have to do anything now."
    1. Re:pgp by 0x0d0a · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I've yet to see any client do PGP right.

      Mutt comes close, but doesn't have the ability to "opportunistically encrypt" messages -- i.e. encrypt the message if a key for the destination email address can be found, otherwise not.

      Using this would help encourage people to use email encryption.

  30. less like Outlook, strange UI things by mydigitalself · · Score: 4, Insightful

    one of the things i've noticed with the (dear me) evolution of Evolution is that when it originally reared its head it was almost a complete copy of Outlook from a UI point of view.

    the version that comes with XD2 seems to have begun a move away from Outlook. and i'm debating in my mind if this is a good thing or not. surely the "switch"-like campaign would favour apps that looked and behaved more like MS apps for the sake of familiarity when moving across to a new environment. obviously the bad side of this is the whole innovation-stiffling argument that if one just mimicks Microsoft behaviour, what benefit other than cost is being added?

    anyway, i would be in a better position to speak once actually having given it a test - but the UI on those screenshots seems a lot LESS intuitive than i've seen in previous releases. a few examples:

    Calendar

    it may seem obvious to a geek, but what is "Local"? and how does that differ from "On This Computer" in the tasks screenshot? also, what the heck is the "Component" button at the bottom there? and why do the buttons at the bottom there look so ugle. the ones on Tasks have icons, those don't. basically inconsistent UI.

    i understand that this is a dev. release, but it seems silly to me to ignore UI in a odd release while developing the functionality and then maybe coming back to it in the following release. the way a user interacts with software should be considered throughout a development cycle as interaction changes can often lead to large programming changes.

    1. Re:less like Outlook, strange UI things by Coryoth · · Score: 2, Interesting

      As other people have pointed out, this is an unstable development release, not a polished final product. I suspect the varied labelling is due to people coding up different components and putting temporary placeholder strings in for now (if the "Component" isn't a give away placeholder string I don't know what is) while they get the features working. I think you'll find a lot of that will be cleaned up for Evolution 2.0

      Jedidiah

  31. Where's the junk button? by bobaferret · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I think the most important feature that is currently missing is the spam filtering. Everyone else has it, why doesn't evolution? Use the code from mozilla if you have to.

    wish I had the time to do it myself.
    -jj-

    1. Re:Where's the junk button? by fea · · Score: 2, Informative

      you can easily add spamassassin as a filter and it would probably be better than anything that would be hard coded into evolution. I already to this and route the output to a "spam" folder. It is in the evolution FAQ on the ximian web site

  32. Yes by Synn · · Score: 5, Informative

    Email their support and they'll send you a 30 day trial key.

    I personally use it to connect to our Exchange 2003 server and it works quite well. Your company's Exchange server will need OWA support enabled however.

  33. I agree by crimguy · · Score: 3, Informative

    Thunderbird has many things going for it as a pure email/nntp app that Evolution doesn't (yet).
    1) Spam controls need to be built into Evolution.
    2) Customizable icons. Evolution's UI is too big and wastes desktop space. It also looks a bit too Gnome 1.4 . . .
    3) Threaded messages don't work particularly well.
    4) Pilot syncing is hit or miss for most people (I've gotten it working in the past, but not since 1.2).
    5) IMAP controls are a bit weird. Either you empty your trash upon exit, or messages marked for deletion stay that way until you do so. Thunderbird is more intuitive, allowing the DEL key to move messages to the Trash folder.
    6) Consistency on each platform. It's nice having the same mail app on Windows, Mac linux and PC linux.

    The big plus for Evolution is the groupware features, which I never use. It has a nice calendar as well. Better integration with the Gnome desktop would be nice.

  34. Still no note/memo support?? by macemoneta · · Score: 2, Interesting

    After all this time and many releases, there is still no support for notes and memos.

    Synchronizing to a PDA will exclude these. This was by far one of the most useful aspects of using Outlook with a PDA (the ability to copy any arbitrary text and load it to a PDA as a memo). I had built large collections of travel directions, software/hardware serial numbers, network IP information, reference data, even Xmas lists using this facility.

    I'd rather the Evolution team provide function parity before they spend time glitzing the UI.

    --

    Can You Say Linux? I Knew That You Could.

    1. Re:Still no note/memo support?? by steveha · · Score: 2, Informative

      Hear, hear.

      I still use JPilot, even though I use Evolution, because I really want access to my notes.

      Evolution developers: please add a "notes" feature to Evolution. Just like on a Palm PDA, the first line of the note should be treated as a title, and there should be a title view for picking a memo. There should be searching within the memo text. The memo feature should use the same character set as the Palm uses so that accents and such display correctly.

      P.S. JPilot has plugins, and I'd like to see the same plugins for Evolution. The top one I want to see: Keyring, the password vault.

      steveha

      --
      lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
  35. Re:Won't be going anywhere near my systems... by mccalli · · Score: 2, Informative
    Dumbass, The world already has moved way past you. We are talking about GUI stuff for the masses NOT the Unix Phil, BIG difference.

    Apple would disagree with you. Apple's approach is to separate out the address book, calendar and mail applications - they all interoperate, but they're all different applications. So far, the only slight glitch in this is the lack of import of birthdays between address book and calendar. Other than that, the approach works really well.

    I'd argue that Apple are rather more geared to the consumer than they are to Unix Phil, but they've shown that you don't need to abandon one in order to please the other.

    Cheers,
    Ian

  36. Version Numbering for Compatibility by Doc+Ruby · · Score: 3, Interesting

    As usual, Evolution's team is doing it right, including the version numbering. We can all learn by their good example.

    FTA:
    "note that there are still some bugs migrating data from 1.4.x to 1.5 and that 1.5 stores its information in ~/.evolution rather than ~/evolution/ so that if you add new info in 1.5 in will not show up in 1.4.x."

    Version numbers should reflect the features and requirements of the software they describe. When I worked for Apple, we recognized that software compatibility depended on both data formats/protocols and user interfaces. MAJOR.minor.revision(.patch/build) numbers reflected interoperability: Adding features, either to the GUI or functionality, that the user could notice, incremented the MAJOR number. Changing data/protocol formats, in the filesystem, over the network, or otherwise (any I/O, like sensors), incremented the minor number. Revision numbers reflected internal changes interesting only to developers, likewise any patch or build numbers. Forward/backward compatibility becomes just another feature/requirement, a special case of any given version, never to be expected unless explicitly included.

    With that simple scheme, we could tell whether a version wouldn't interoperate with other software in a suite, or might require retraining (eg, glance at documentation) to use. Or fixed a bug. With those rules, we defended rational version numbering in favor of users (and developers) - defended from the insane ravages of marketdroids who were locked in a version numbering "arms race" with the competition.

    --

    --
    make install -not war

  37. Re:Hmm. Time for another trial by madcow_ucsb · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Ok, I'm probably trolling at this point but....

    Good.

    Anything that forces users to get off POP3 and use something halfway decent (IMAP anyone?) is a good thing in my book.

    It beats having to deal with people who get all their email stuck on their laptop and end up loosing all synchronization with the server and their other systems. With IMAP everything stays on the server, you only download the *headers* you want, you get info on what you've replied to and read, you get multiple folders...

    Seriously, why is POP even supported anymore? I don't think I've touched a POP server in about 3 years....

    So tell your friends to hit that IMAP button instead of POP and lets let POP die already...

  38. ehr, am I reading freshmeat right now? by flok · · Score: 2, Insightful

    It really puzzles me why this evolution-program is announced on slashdot.
    Ok, the linux-kernel I can understand, but some program clearly not every linux-user is using? This isn't freshmeat.net!

    -- Flok 3.0.2

    --

    www.vanheusden.com - home of Multitail, HTTPing, CoffeeSaint, EntropyBroker, rsstail, bsod, listener, nagcon, nagi
  39. Re:Hmm. Time for another trial by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    "Seriously, why is POP even supported anymore?"

    Because some places don't want every user's entire mail history on the server?

    A Nony Mouse

  40. Re:Won't be going anywhere near my systems... by Tet · · Score: 2, Insightful
    There are now users who demand a single app that is completely integrated.

    Rubbish. That sort of user wouldn't even know the difference. It's all down to presentation. If you can present a bunch of apps so that they work together seamlessly, then the end user may as well think of them as a single app. That's the direction in which we should be heading. But too many people are too eager to clone the mistakes that Microsoft have made instead...

    --
    "The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
  41. Re:Windows drivers are bundled by AstroDrabb · · Score: 2, Informative
    Unaccelerated means that dialog box painting, web page scrolling, and Flash animations will run like molasses. Yes, Flash animations are important to novice users, many of whom frequent Flash portals such as killfrog, newgrounds, and the like. If painting and scrolling are slow, then "this computer is slower than the one that came with Windows."
    Debian is based on older code. Fedora Core 1 supports my Radeon out-of-the-box with 2D and 3D acceleration. ATI does release specs on their cards. They just keep a few things proprietary. If you want that little extra that ATI keeps, you can download their binary driver. NVidia on the other hand does not realease specs, though their proprietary drivers are top notch IMO and work great under Linux.

    Also there are two types of accelration. 2D and 3D. If you are using Debian based on older code, you may not have 3D acceleration, but you will still have full 2D acceleration, so your flash, web pages, dialog boxes, etc will *not* be slow. In fact you won't even notice that there is no 3D acceleration under an older code base such as Debian until you try to run something like Tux Racer. If you want that 3D acceleration, use Fedora or SuSE. The Radeon on my laptop has very fast 2D and 3D and the GeForce 3 Ti 500 on my desktop has very, very fast 2D and 3D with the NVidia binaries, both under Linux.
    --
    If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
    it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison