Evolution in Ubuntu (was: Re: Evolution & Ubuntu 10.04 LTS)

[Paul Smith]

Last year I expressed concern over the fact that Ubuntu was leaving
behind Evolution in Lucid (that is, shipping Gnome 2.30 but leaving
Evolution alone back at 2.28).  The explanation at that time was that
the change from Evo 2.28 to 2.30 involved a lot of significant rework
(which it did) and that the LTS release was not a place to experiment
with that sort of change.

OK, fine.

I was definitely perplexed, then, to see that in Maverick, which is not
by anyone's standards a long-term support release and is running Gnome
2.32, Evolution was left at version 2.30!

And now I've heard (not officially) that Natty, which (as I understand
it) will contain Gnome 3 as the base version, will ship with Evolution
2.32!!

It's one thing to leave behind this package due to the confluence of LTS
and a major amount of rewriting, but what is the justification for
continuing to ship obsoleted versions of Evolution with every release of
Ubuntu?

Is this some sort of new policy decision, that Evolution will forever be
left back in every release?