Mozilla Thunderbird

[Keith Irwin]

On Sun, 2005-01-02 at 12:56 +1000, CB wrote:
> Keith Irwin wrote:
> 
> > 
> > 
> > I think they're trying to push personal information management down to
> > the library level such that, say, an "address book" or "contact manager"
> > is part of the infrastructure of the desktop itself, shareable by any
> > application, but not any more required than, say, GConf or dbus.
> 
> OK, this is what I would mean by integration at the protocol or  api 
> level, and I don't have a problem with that at all. I read the earlier 
> post as implying that the desktop integration would require Evolution. 
> That smacked to me of the Microsoft 'shallow' approach to integration 
> ie. using their apps and suites (notably IE and Office) as the lynchpins 
> for desktop integration (thus effectively mandating their use for the 
> Windows platform).

CB:

Do a "dpkg -l | grep evolution" if you're running hoary.  Pretty
interesting!  A lot of "backend lib for address books" and "client lib
for address books" and so on for calendars as well.

I do know that you can install evolution-data-server independently of
evolution and that the data server runs even when evo itself has been
closed.  This means you get your calendar event notifications without
having to have the app open.

Looks like they're doing it the "right" way, as much as that's
possible. ;)

Keith


> 
> > 
> > I'm not a good apologist for this sort of stuff, but I think that what
> > the evolution team is trying to do is commoditize, or refactor, a bit of
> > functionality.  In other words, the PIM stuff is a database, with the
> > email, IM, or other clients as user interfaces above that.  I'm thinking
> > it's what Gnome folks want in their goal of making things easier.
> > People seem to like that sort of thing in the Mac UI, don't they?
> 
> I would like all my apps to share the same pool of data. Ultimately that 
> could, if done properly, make a fairly promiscuous approach to apps 
> easier if anything.
> 
> I probably should have a direct read of what the Gnome team are up to 
> before objecting.
>