Evolution & Ubuntu 10.04 LTS

[Sebastien Bacher]

Le vendredi 05 mars 2010 à 08:41 -0500, Paul Smith a écrit :
> However, I don't see any problems and I've been building Evo 2.29.x
> from the latest git source every few days and using it "in anger" on
> all of my systems for daily email (and I get/send a LOT of email),
> with both IMAP and MAPI, for the last 3 months or so.  It works MUCH
> better than 2.28. 

(Replying to this email since the reply was not only on the listed and
landed in a box where I deleted it)

> Sorry, but that's wrong: 2.28 is unquestionably broken.

Let's say not everybody shares your view on that but put in context you
rather seem to suggest that mapi in 2.28 is broken right?

> The Exchange MAPI support simply does not work, except maybe for the
> most trivial cases.  Color me unimpressed with statements to the
> contrary

Nobody stated the contrary. The evolution-mapi version 2.29 probably
works much better seeing the issues which have been raised on 2.28 but
evolution-mapi is neither installed by default in Ubuntu nor officially
supported and we can't trade the stability of the default email client
for the vast majority of users for better exchange support. 

> 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?

No we didn't try 2.29, it has been decided in the start at UDS that we
would stay on the stable version. We do talked to upstream regularly
though, join often their weekly meeting and chat on their IRC channel.
Nobody in the upstream team discussed our decisions and most of the
upstream hackers agreed that evolution is not a trivial piece of code
and that stabilizing the new version which all the infrastructure
changes will be challenging and leading probably to a 2.30 version which
will need some work still. 

Ubuntu has been bitten by upgrading to new versions which were rewritten
in the past and we have learnt, the decision has been made to stay on a
version which is not perfect but that we know about rather running to
use a rewrite in the risk of being stucked with something not ready
quality and feature wise for a lts. Note also that tracking such a
rewrite requires to commit ressources to track the updates, refactore
the packaging, track the bug and work with upstream to make sure those
get fixed on a regular basis and that the current Ubuntu team is quite
busy already so we prefer to dedicate ressources to improve what we have
now.

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

Yes, on experience from people packaging this software for years and
tracking its bug, on discussion with the community at UDS and on
discussions with the people writting the software. 
None of those feeling comfortable saying that 2.30 will be for sure
stable enough to be used in distribution where users expect stability
rather than the newest versions.

There is no perfect solution and either ways some users will be unhappy,
if your real issue is the mapi support why don't we try to see what we
can do about this one? And in any case there will be most likely a ppa
which will have evolution 2.30 builds for lucid that you will be able to
use if you want to try that version or a better mapi support.

> 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

On what do you base those comments? In fact upstream just roll 2.28.3
less than a week ago and agreed to keep commiting changes to gnome-2-28
git when it makes sense to make collaboration between the distributions
which will stay on those versions for a while easier. We do often look
to fixes from other distributions too and lts versions do get new
versions of GNOME usually too.

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