[Evolution-hackers] Evolution 2.4: dream it, do it!

[Nat Friedman <nat novell com>]

Party people in the house,

Evolution 2.2 was released recently: our fifth major release in the
last five years.  Thanks to everyone who has helped to bring Evolution
this far!

The question is, where do we go from here?

Evolution has 1,120 wishlist bugs open in bugzilla today.  It would be
easy to plod ahead, adding features here and there that satisfy 1% of
our users each.  Highly successful software projects like Evolution
have a tendency to do that.

Instead, the focus for 2.4 will be "quality over features."  

We are taking a page out of the book of Google or Firefox, doing a
great job at the basics instead of adding tons of little bells and
whistles.  Thanks to EPlugin, anyone can attach their own bells,
whistles, flashing lights, motorized armatures, automated pancake
makers, etc.

So in Evolution 2.4, to be released this September, we are asking for
help improving the basic user experience.  

In the past, Evolution development has been dominated by Novell/Ximian
employees; this time we want other contributors to have more of an
opportunity to shape the roadmap.

We've created a wiki where the actual plan for Evolution 2.4 will be
crafted.  Contributors should jump on and help out.  We will follow a
three-step process in writing the roadmap:

    1) Collect ideas and comments from Evolution contributors
    
    2) Prioritize and winnow out the things we can't do
    
    3) Write up a list of tasks for what we're going to do

The tasks will show up as tables in the Wiki.  You can check out what
we have so far here:

    http://go-evolution.org/Evo2.4

Below is a brief summary of the focus areas for 2.4 hacking.

Performance

    Evolution should feel light and snappy.  Common problems today
    include excessive memory use and slow IMAP performance.  Some
    operations (going offline, shutting down) can be very slow, and
    some could be faster (switching messages isn't quite instant).

    http://go-evolution.org/Evo2.4#Performance
    

Stability

    Evolution has been fairly stable in most releases.  What we want
    to do in 2.4 is *lower the bar* for bugs that we consider
    important and reduce the "quirk count," as well as continuing to
    fix the major bugs as they come up.

    One major project that we will undertake is the creation of a
    complete automated test suite for Evolution, from unit tests to UI
    testing.

    http://go-evolution.org/Evo2.4#Bug_Fixing

User Interface

    Evolution's UI has grown organically over the years, as new
    features have been added.  Much of Evolution was written before
    the HIG was a twinkle in GNOME's eye.  And some parts of
    Evolution's UI look old-school next to newer mail, calendar and
    addressbook clients.

    It is time to take a step back and overhaul some parts of the
    Evolution user interface.

    We won't be able to do a complete rewrite in 2.4, and a complete
    rewrite is probably the wrong approach.  Instead we will first
    take a broad look at Evolution UI, and then start redoing parts of
    it, one at a time.

    One of the first steps will be for Rodney and Ben to commit their
    UI menu, toolbar and string changes ASAP.  We want to get these
    changes into the tree early, so that there is time for them to
    marinate before we release.  Flavor is key.

Community Involvement

    Besides this open, Wiki-based approach we are using for the Evo
    2.4 roadmap, we are doing a few other things in the next several
    months.

    A migration of all Evo bugs to the GNOME bugzilla has begun to
    allow better cross-bug dependencies with GNOME/Gtk bugs, and to
    harmonize better with the rest of the GNOME team.  We hope to have
    this migration done in the next week or so.

    We also want to improve EPlugin and its documentation so that
    external developers can add cool hacks to Evolution without
    hacking inside the Evo tree itself.

Obviously, there is a lot to do.  We hope everyone is excited about
our plan to really focus on quality and performance in this release.
We think Evolution users will be the better for it.

Let the hacking begin!

Nat