Move Evolution to Extras?

[David Woodhouse]

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.

-- 
dwmw2