[Evolution-hackers] Evolution-2.4 Mac Problems/ Release etc

[Shreyas Sriniavasan <sshreyas novell com>]

Hey guys,

I have been working on releasing Evolution-2.4 for Mac OS X on and off
for some time now. 
I have a basic setup up and working but there are a few problems with
porting the Plugins 
architecture to the MAC. 

Plugins in Evolution are typically Shared Libraries and some of them
(exchange, groupwise) link to the components (libevolution-mail,
libevolution-calnedar.so) which  are Dynamically loadable modules. On
the MAC / BSD (?) platforms this is not portable, Dynamically loadable
modules cannot be linked against. Hence linking of shared libraries
against dynamically loadable modules
would not build. This issue is not visible on Linux cos Dynamically
loadable modules and Shared Libraries are treated as same by the linker.

Further explanations of the same can be found here

http://fink.sourceforge.net/doc/porting/shared.php?phpLang=en#lib-and-mod

I have been talking to NotZed about how we could go about fixing these.
One solution which
both of us found acceptable was to split all the components (dynamically
loadable modules) into 
a dynamically loadable module and a shared library. And since whenever
dynamically loadable modules are loaded into memory all the stuff they
are linked against also get loaded anyway.

Please note that dynamically loadable modules can link to shared objects
and not vice versa.

So considering that we already know what the solution is (phew) i need
to see the time frame
needed to fix the issue. I have been looking at the mailer code and i am
fairly confident of 
how to do it but ofcourse the task would be beyond just fixing the
mailer. And as people have 
been busy with the gnome-2.12 release this has taken bit of a back seat.
I would love to hear from the maintainers of each of the components as
to how the split should happen. This requires
detailed knowledge of the code and sadly my knowledge however meagre
would be limited to the mailer. So for a thorough fix and a closure of
this problem i would love to hear from all the
maintainers.

The plugins which is most hampered by these problems is Exchange and
Groupwise. For groupwise
only a small functionality would be missing but exchange would be
*despairingly crippled* without the fix. So i am going to make a
evolution-2.4 mac release in the next one week without exchange then
make a dot release later with exchange as and when we get this fixed.

Any thoughts/ inferences and suggestions are welcome.

Regards,
Shreyas