Re: [Evolution-hackers] Summer of Code Project

[Not Zed <notzed ximian com>]

Hi David,

> My name is David Morrison, I was selected by GNOME and Google to
> participate in Google's Summer of Code project working on Evolution.  I
> will be a sophmore at Harvey Mudd College in the fall, and am pursuing a
> joint major in computer science and math.
> 
> Anyways, I've been working pretty closely with Bryan Clark on this
> project, and I've put together a spec for what I'm doing, which you can
> read at http://www.cs.hmc.edu/~dmorrison/soc/Spec_revised.pdf -- the
> basic rundown of my project is that I am going to be adding a
> Gmail-style conversation view to Evolution, so that all messages in one
> conversation can be seen in one continuous stream.  Bryan asked me to
> email this list and ask for thoughts and suggestions on the proposal.
> (Bryan also put together a couple mockups that work a little bit better
> with evo's look-and-feel than mine do; you can see them here:
> http://www.cs.hmc.edu/~dmorrison/soc/conversation_email.png and
> http://www.cs.hmc.edu/~dmorrison/soc/conversation_email_reply.png)
> 
> Here are a few specific questions I have about the project as a whole:
> 
> - First of all, how feasible is what I'm talking about doing?  Will it
> fit in easily with the direction the Evolution is going?  In other
> words, will the work I'm doing be accepted by the Evo community, and if
> not, is there some way I could change stuff to make it acceptable?

It would certainly only want to be an option.

Since you could probably do a fairly reasonable first-cut as a plugin,
you could see how it works first, without having to alter the main code
a lot, and then let people decide after that.  The only problem with a
plugin is adjusting the message list to suit, although at first cut you
could just leave it as is and worry about it later, since it is
more-or-less a separate problem.

Actually changing the entire render path otherwise is a pretty major
issue.  If it were to become a core feature, it would also have to worry
about supporting other plugins properly, and things like that that gmail
presumably doesn't need to concern itself with.

> - Secondly, are there any foreseeable problems coding these changes?
> What are going to be the trickiest parts?

The algorithm to create the message stream would by far be the trickiest
bit.

>From the mockup screenshots you have, this could at a first-cut be done
by creating a new message which was a multipart containing messages with
minimal headers and then just dump that to the reset of the renderer.
That way you'd get the 'reply to sender' stuff for free, although it
would obviously display a bit differently, since it would include some
headers like to/from/etc (if you wanted it to).

Then once that works i guess it shouldn't be too difficult to translate
it to another display mechanism which had more control.  Or some way to
control quoting when replying - which is another big issue.

> - A couple questions more related to the overall design:  What do you
> guys think of having an in-line reply box in the message view pane, like
> Gmail does?  I said in the spec that I thought it probably wouldn't fit
> as well, but Bryan seems to think it would be ok.

I dont follow what you mean here.  You mean like have a web page with
the composer underneath the message itself, in the same window?  Ugh, no
thanks, web applications suck big time, they're only doing that because
they have no choice.  Scrolling areas with scrolling embedded widgets in
them is absolutely abysmal.

> - I also said in the spec that using color to distinguish between
> senders would not work as well, but I'm now thinking (and Bryan agrees)
> that using a bit of color here and there would make things less a wash
> of black-and-white.  Any thoughts on this one?

I dont know what you mean, never seen gmail.  But doing anything with
colour is very problematic as you need to integrate with themes, ideally
automatically.

> Any other comments or suggestions you guys have are also welcome.
> Thanks in advance for your help!
> 
> David Morrison
> dmorrison hmc edu
> 
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