Re: [Evolution] Reply-To: field on the evolution list

["B. Joshua Rosen" <bjrosen polybus com>]

Matthew and the other developers,

I think it's a terrible mistake to be adding any new features to
Evolution until the bugs have been fixed. Nobody cares about
customizable toolbars or keyboard shortcuts, those things can wait.
Evolution is in a terrible state at the moment. It crashes all of the
time, it should never crash. It loses the ability to talk to pop server
after 24 hours (at least it loses the ability to talk to Comcast's
servers) which necessitates restarting the app. And virtual folders is
completely broken. Virtual folders is a really important feature, unlike
trivial things like customizable toolbars, and more importantly it
worked fine for years until the changes in 2.24.

The most important things to users are,

1) Reliablity. A program should work all of the time, it should never
crash or hang. Nothing else matters if a program is as unstable as
Evolution has become.

2) Speed. Once a program is reliable the next most important thing is
speed, ideally every thing should be instantaneous. Evolution has gotten
slower and slower. In Fedora 11 it takes 10 minutes to sort through the
virtual folders when it's opened, and if it has to convert from and
earlier version it can take a full day (on a Core2, God knows how long
it takes on older hardware) to do the conversion.

3) Features. This is dead last especially in the case of Evolution which
is already very feature rich. 

The Evolution team should devote the next year fixing it's bugs and then
getting the performance back to where it was. Once that's done you can
consider new functionality.

Thanks,

Josh

On Sun, 2009-10-11 at 20:06 -0500, Matthew Barnes wrote:
> On Sun, 2009-10-11 at 19:56 -0430, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
> > There is an outstanding request (from many years ago) for
> > user-configurable keyboard shortcuts, which for some reason never seem
> > to get any attention from the devels. I guess once they do that then a
> > customizable icon bar (which Firefox and Thunderbird already have)
> > would be next.
>
> See my previous comments on this:
> http://mail.gnome.org/archives/evolution-list/2009-August/msg00149.html
>
> With Bonobo finally out of the way, you'll get the configurable keyboard
> shortcuts in 2.29.1, and customizable toolbars are now feasible (but not
> yet a priority -- we've got some bigger fish to fry first).
>
> Also, I and I think most of the other developers -do- read the list.  We
> just tend to refrain from participating in the same tired old arguments
> about email etiquette and how the project is going down the tubes.
>
> That said, a little more reassurance from us that we're still here and
> we're listening would not be a bad thing.
>
> Matthew Barnes
>
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-- 
B. Joshua Rosen, VP
Polybus Systems Corp
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