1.4 Issues

[Melanie <balsa t-data com>]

Hi,

 I was forced to discontinue using Balsa. I am having major problems
that have forced me to use Evolution for the time being. My problems are
these:

Compilation issues:

* autogen.sh will emit numerous warnings and does not produce a clean
configure script. I have reinstalled the automake / autoconf packages
several times, no help there.

* once I do manage to create a configure script, by editing configure.in
and manually running aclocal, autoheader, autoconf, automake, it
complains about missing Makefile.in or Makefile.in.in in several
directories (intl, po, m4)

* When those makefiles are created with two empty targets, all: and
install:, configure fails to locate gtkhtml because it is no longer
managed by gnome-config in recent red hat releases. It needs to be
located using 'pkg-config --libs gtkhtml-1.1'

* Trying to compile, several makefiles need to be edited, because
@AMDEP_TRUE@ is not recognized by the versions of automake / autoconf
that come with RedHat 8.0

* Further, -Werror can no longer be turned off with
--disable-more-warnings. It causes compilation to fail in
balsa-message.c because of a missing prototype

* Manual makefile editing is also required to make the compiler find the
gtkhtml includes and libtool will not find the libs unless the makefile
is editied to properly use pkg-config

Installation issue:

* Missing pixmaps will cause a segfault. As a person who does not like
to blindly use 'make install', running Balsa from the src/ directory is
not possible

Running issues:

* Balsa will segfault intermittently when displaying a message in the
preview pane. The crash is preceded by numerous gtk warnings and cannot
be debugged because of stack corruption (no bt possible, unusable  core
files)

* Clicking any link or choosing 'open' from a context menu will hang
Balsa. It needs a sigterm and all deleted messages, hundreds of them
sometimes, are back in my inbox when I restart it.

* Twice I have observed a condition where Balsa hangs and also hangs the
entire X server. No windows are responsive and I have to switch to a
text console (takes forever) or use a network login from another machine
to kill Balsa. After Balsa is killed, X recovers. Evolution has also
shown this behavior once, so the root cause may be some library used by
both.

Balsa 2 works, but I don't want to use it. It wastes screen space. With
1.4, I can view my entire mailbox tree without scrolling, with Balsa 2
it is almost twice as tall and I must scroll to access mailboxes located
further down the tree. Also, when I resize the columns in the tree so
that the names are shown entirely and the counts are also visible, the
remaining horizontal space is not sufficient to display all of a
properly formatted text message. Using Balsa 2 forces too many usability
compromises. There seems to be no way to independently control the font
size used in the tree view, or, if I do change it, the cell height of
the tree view does not decrease accordingly, all I get is smaller text.

Also, though this is really a gtkhtml issue, at least with Balsa 2 I
have observed that certain spam messages will send gtkhtml into a loop
that will constantly increase the width of the document. If it is not
stopped very quickly, it will segfault.

Regards,

Melanie