On Tue, 2006-04-04 at 09:26 -0700, Pete Zaitcev wrote:
Now the upstream stewardhip, maintainership, or whatever seems to be collapsing and those frustrated with Evo try to jump ship, but to where? It sure as hell ain't Sylpheed.
Maybe Thunderbird... but it doesn't do non-email stuff, and even the email part of it has its own problems -- http://mbligh.org/linuxdocs/Email/Clients/Thunderbird
Maybe kontact -- although as discussed elsewhere I had to give up on switching to kmail because of http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=26986 I suppose we could fix that though.
Maybe primates just need a good fork in the liver and Evo gets viable again. I hope at least.
The worst-offending primates _do_ seem to have got a fork in the liver already -- so maybe Novell's maintainership of Evolution is picking up. Certainly the folks in India seems a lot saner and I wouldn't expect the kind of responses I got to simple bug-fixes like this one any more... http://mail.gnome.org/archives/evolution-patches/2005-March/msg00435.html
The responses: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/evolution-patches/2005-March/msg00458.html http://mail.gnome.org/archives/evolution-patches/2005-March/msg00461.html
Anyway, talk to Havoc first, ask him if he planned for this eventuality.
Funnily, in the same time period, we very nearly selected some obscure web browser instead of Firefox. It may be instructive to compare the cases with the Evo.
We did the right thing when we shipped firefox, and we have mozilla developers in-house.
We _may_ have done the right thing when we shipped Evolution, but we dropped the ball because we've never really had an in-house maintainer whose primary function is to keep Evolution on track. It's always just been packaged in someone's spare time, I believe.
Allegedly we're supposed to be trying to hire an Evolution maintainer, although that req has been open for a while now: http://redhat.hrdpt.com/cgi-bin/a/highlightjob.cgi?jobid=961
That might be the way out of the fix we're in now -- but it can't happen fast enough. We already have people who've updated systems to FC5 and are regretting it because their users are extremely unhappy. What are we going to do about that? There were 'FC5Blocker' bugs filed against Evolution long before FC5 was released... and they're still not fixed.
On the whole, I've been very unimpressed with FC5. Perhaps that's just because I haven't really been using it in anger on my real machines, because the Evolution bugs prevented me from doing so -- so I didn't get a chance to find and fix all the other things which break for _me_ before the final release, as I would normally have done before a release.