Evolution & Ubuntu 10.04 LTS

[Paul Smith]

On Fri, 2010-03-05 at 17:17 +0100, Sebastien Bacher wrote:
> The current version of evolution is not broken and probably not over
> an unstable version which got some much rewrital and so few testing.

Sorry, but that's wrong: 2.28 is unquestionably broken.  To quote you,
"Glad that it works for you it doesn't mean that everything is bugless".

The Exchange MAPI support simply does not work, except maybe for the
most trivial cases.  Color me unimpressed with statements to the
contrary: within a few days of using it the first time last fall I ran
across a bug (which I discovered already filed in bugzilla for months,
and not fixed yet!) that caused my entire INBOX on the Exchange server
to be completely deleted.  I had to request from IT that it be restored
from backup.  Good times.

That one got fixed (eventually) but it was just the first one I ran
into, and those are just the bugs.  There are MAPI _features_ that
simply don't work in 2.28, especially related to calendaring.  I'll tell
you how broken it is: I still run Outlook in Crossover rather than Evo
2.28--and I loathe Outlook more than just about any software I've ever
used.

> Glad that it works for you it doesn't mean that everything is bugless.

That's a straw man.  The question isn't whether it's bugless or not: the
question is whether it's better than Evo 2.28 or not.

> The Ubuntu team decided to stay a known version because jumping on a
> rewrite not done yet would be risky and would requiring having
> ressourcing working chasing bugs and updates for that new version.

Have the Ubuntu devs actually tried using the new version?  Have they
run into problems?  Has anyone on the Ubuntu team contacted the Evo
developer's lists to ask their opinion and discuss the stability with
other users of 2.29.x?

Is the decision based on anything more concrete than reading the
roadmap?

> You can also note that the next RHEL version will use 2.28 and that
> Debian might be doing so in their coming stable, it means this version
> will keep being stabilized and worked.

Let's be honest.  No one is going to follow the RHEL packaging of Gnome
2.28 and be porting Evolution fixes into the Ubuntu repository.  Ditto
for Debian.  And certainly the Gnome devs won't be making new releases
upstream, although Ubuntu rarely packages them anyway.

In my experience (using Ubuntu since 2006 or so, including LTS versions)
only the most egregious bugs get addressed in the LTS and of course, no
new features will be available.  Anything that was broken in 9.10 as
well will not be considered a regression, and so won't be addressed at
all unless it's a security fix.