Re: shouldn't evolution drop some features?

[Rodney Dawes <dobey novell com>]

On Sat, 2006-12-09 at 11:13 +0100, David Prieto wrote:
> I'm no linux guru, but there is supposed to be a UNIX motto that says:
> do one thing and do it right. Most gnome apps follow this philosophy,
> AFAIK, but evolution does lots of different things. It handles mail,
> contacts, calendars, tasks and even notes.
> 
> There are several projects out there like contacts
> http://projects.o-hand.com/contacts and dates
> http://projects.o-hand.com/dates that could handle some of the features
> evo manages right now. They rely on evolution-data-server, so only the
> GUI part would be affected. As for notes, I can't see why we can't use
> tomboy which is now officially a part of gnome.
> 
> I might be asking something really dumb, but is there a good reason why
> evolution shouldn't handle e-mails and nothing else?

While Dates and Contacts are interesting projects, they are not meant as
replacements for the address book and calendar within Evolution itself.
They only provide a very small subset of features at best. Evolution is
also 8+ years old now. It's got millions of lines of code. Trimming it
down is not as simple as "don't install the $foo component,"
unfortunately. We can't just remove a lot of these features either, as
large roll-outs are depending on them.

However, I think there is overwhelming consensus that we need to split
the components into separate applications. But it's not a trivial task,
and finding the time, and people that can do it right, isn't easy. I'm
not sure how hard it would be to bring Contacts and Dates up to par with
the feature set of Evolution, either. It's certainly not an easy task.

-- dobey