Evolution & Ubuntu 10.04 LTS

[Paul Smith]

On Fri, 2010-03-05 at 11:23 +0200, Peteris Krisjanis wrote:
> Well, as far as I have heard from developers, Staying with Evolution
> 2.28 decision was made because 2.30 will have too big sweeping
> changes, like D-BUS instead of Bonobo, etc. So it is too much for LTS.

What?!?!  Is that really true?  This is the first I've heard of this!
Evo 2.30 is an integral part of Gnome 2.30--it's bogus to try to leave
it behind.

Evolution is at the same time one of the most important applications for
deployment of Linux in a typical corporate environment (read:
Exchange-based), and also one of the most problematic historically.
That means we need to push _forward_, though, not hang back.  There are
real problems with 2.28: I can't believe anyone would prefer to stay
with that over 2.30 regardless of LTS.

Not all those problems are fixed in 2.30 but the Exchange MAPI support
in 2.29 is far ahead of 2.28, and the new capabilities added in
2.29/2.30 for other backends solve lots of bugs and clean up all kinds
of issues.  Plus, if Ubuntu moves to 2.30 they will get the advantage of
fixes made for 2.30.1, 2.30.2, etc.  2.28.x will be dead (is already
dead, from Gnome's perspective) and backporting changes across that
barrier will be extremely difficult for exactly the reasons quoted above
(sweeping changes).  Does Ubuntu really want to get stuck with broken
Evo for the entirety of the LTS?


Have the decision makers been following the development lists and trying
the new version?  Surely they must have some factual basis for such a
decision, in terms of experienced instability, rather than just running
away from the bullet list of changes.  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.