[Bug 653619] Re: Please back port Evolution 2.32 to lucid LTS and maverick

[Krzysztof Klimonda]

The short answer wrt official backport of Evolution 2.32 to maverick is
that it's unlikely given the amount of work, a number of people who can
do that work, and the proximity of 11.04 release which will ship with
2.32. The longer explanation is below.

The reason for not changing the status of the maverick task is that,
when I've asked Scott to close the lucid one, I have not yet evaluated
backporting of Evolution 2.32 to 10.10. It was a long night, I just did
a bunch of testing and I simply didn't take a look. I haven't assigned
myself to the bug, because it might have been read as the indication
that I'm working on the backport through the -backports pocket - it
hasn't been a case a week ago. Since then I've spent some time
backporting 2.32 to 10.04 and kept the work in my PPA - that, and my
work, didn't leave me much time to even take a look at maverick.

I've spent some more time tonight working on that and my current opinion
is that the official backport to maverick is just not worth the work it
would take. Just evolution requires backporting  2 other packages:
evolution-data-server and gtkhtml3.14. Both Evolution and e-d-s ships
libraries that other packages are depending on, and there was an ABI
bump which means that those packages will require at least a rebuild.

The number, and nature of changes required to do an official backport of
Evolution to maverick makes it impossible - they won't be accecpted by
the archive admins, they are against the official policy.

That being said I will provide Evolution 2.32 in my PPA[1] as a part of
the upgrade path from lucid to natty.

Also, if anyone is interested in starting testing Evolution 2.32 for
10.04 I've started uploading packages to this PPA:
https://launchpad.net/~kklimonda/+archive/evo232 - they will never make
it to lucid-backports but it is a solution for those who can't update to
11.04. If you don't like the idea of using PPAs for this (I don't) then
start nagging Launchpad people to provide an official way for developers
to provide some kind of thrusted repositories.

DISCLAIMER Those package were not thoroughly tested, and should not be
installed on production systems, I expect that, with enough feedback, it
will take at least a month to make them stable enough. Some really weird
bugs may show up, I may end up backporting much more packages to make
them work with new libraries from evolution and e-d-s, it is also
possible that it will never get stable enough for broader audience
DISCLAIMER

[1] Really, PPAs are the only sane way of doing such an update without
throwing a team of dedicated developers who can spend time on both
backporting and QA of the resulting packages.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/653619

Title:
  Please back port Evolution 2.32 to lucid LTS and maverick