[Evolution-hackers] Merging the collaboration providers in a single package

[chen <pchenthill novell com>]

Hi,
  We had discussed about merging the collaborative providers such as
evolution-exchange, evolution-mapi, groupwise, kolab and evolution-ews
(on development) into a single package in previous community meeting.
There are certain advantages and some concern areas in it, let me
summarize them on what we discussed in the community meeting
(http://projects.gnome.org/evolution/meeting-logs/2010-09-15.shtml),

Advantages of having the providers in a single package:
+ All the API updates can be adapted to the providers and made sure all
the providers compile.
+ Packagers can looks for updates from one package rather than
evolution-groupwise, evolution-exchange, evolution-ews, evolution-kolab
etc.


Concern areas:
+ We may have to be pruning some backends if there are no bug fixes and
if its not kept alive (for eg: google backend was replaced with caldav
for the same reason)
+ The bugs from various packages have to be moved to a single package in
bugzilla.


Of-course some authors third-party external backends may not be
interested or may not be possible due to some licencing issues. But we
can at-least facilitate it if the authors and evolution maintainers are
interested in maintaining it.

The other solution was to maintain all exchange providers in a single
package, merging evolution-exchange, evolution-ews and evolution-mapi
into a single package. Other collaboration providers like
evolution-groupwise and evolution-kolab (yet to be upstreamed) will
remain as separate packages.

My personal opinion is to club all the collaboration providers into a
single package would be good. It would be good if we discuss the pro's
and con's more deeper and involve packagers as well while moving on to a
solution.


Thanks, Chenthill.