Evolution in Ubuntu

[Paul Smith]

On Sat, 2011-01-22 at 16:16 +1000, Chris Jones wrote:
> > Is this some sort of new policy decision, that Evolution will
> > forever be left back in every release?
> 
> Hi Paul. I can understand what you are saying, but is it really that
> important to you? I'm curious as to why it's bugging you this much.
> Does Evolution 2.32 have a particular feature that you require?

Evolution is now, thanks to the tireless efforts of Matthew Barnes
(among others), undergoing impressive amounts of feature addition and
bug fixing every single release.  With every release it increases its
integration with Gnome facilities, reduces bugs, gains new capabilities,
etc. at a pretty rapid pace (compared with a few years ago).  The code
is being cleaned up, dialogs fixed, hangs removed/parallelism
introduced, etc. etc.  Bonobo and other ancient Gnome technologies are
being excised, dbus and gconf uses are being fixed, etc.  The IMAP+
backend is being enhanced to work better with newer IMAP server
capabilities.  Other backends have similar enhancements.

Honestly I can't remember exactly what features/enhancements went into
exactly which version of Evo.  But in general, yes, it is that important
to me :-)

> If you're keen enough, you can probably sneak in the updated Evolution
> into your own system from a third party PPA or something. I'm sure the
> deb files are available from somewhere on the internet. It might be
> worth your while doing a Google search for them.

Well, I have myself created and maintained a makefile that allows people
to build Evo (and its various parts) and install it in a separate
directory, so it doesn't interfere with the package versions; I prefer
this method.

There are a lot of reasons this Makefile (or a PPA) are not optimal,
which I can get into if anyone REALLY cares.


I guess I would turn around your question and say, what's Ubuntu's
justification for choosing this one particular application to "leave
behind" at an older version?  I understand the confluence of "major
changes + LTS" that resulted in the 10.04 decision, but this seems like
something that would need to be individually revisited for each release.

Anyway, it sounds like everything is good for Ubuntu 11.04, sticking
with Gnome 2.32.  I'm presuming that the Evo 3 will be in the Gnome 3
PPA for those who want to try it, along with the rest of Gnome 3.

Cheers!