Re: [Evolution-hackers] Retiring evolution-exchange

[Milan Crha <mcrha redhat com>]

On Fri, 2012-06-01 at 06:57 -0400, Matthew Barnes wrote:
> On Fri, 2012-06-01 at 15:19 +0530, Chenthill wrote:
> > Then why not retire evolution-mapi instead of evolution-exchange ?
> 
> I hadn't considered that.  I'll defer to Milan to make that call.
> 
> I thought evolution-mapi worked with Exchange 2003 servers at least in
> theory; I don't know how much actual testing that's had.  And I know
> Milan has been maintaining evo-mapi more actively than evo-exchange and
> has a good working relationship with the OpenChange developers.
> 
> In any case, maintaining this many different backends for Exchange is
> ridiculous and we need to drop at least one of them given our manpower
> shortage.  I guess I don't care so much which, and am probably not the
> most qualified to choose.
> 
> What do you think, Milan?

	Hi,
the evolution-exchange doesn't have any active maintainer these
days/months/years, the focus was moved to evolution-mapi during last few
years, and "recently" to evolution-ews, as you know. I maintain
evolution-mapi currently, and I will, at least until evolution-ews is
more feature-rich. Another reason is that I spent quite some time on
improvements in evolution-mapi for 3.4.0, making it more feature
complete (with compare to evolution-exchange), and I basically rewrote
its core. It's still about to make sure the changes work on each setup,
but that's what the maintenance is about, isn't it. :)

evolution-ews is far from evolution-mapi features, but it's still
significantly quicker than evolution-mapi. I believe the biggest
disadvantage on evolution-mapi is its slowness (on a lower layer, mostly
with RPC calls).

evolution-activesync sounds nice, though it does only mail currently,
and I was told there are more limitations on the server side for it too,
thus even I liked it as such, it is not usable for enterprise currently
(feel free to correct me, David).

There are more aspects how to compare these connectors, I wasn't asked
to do that all here, but let's sum a bit with Chen's comment:

evolution-exchange
  - for 2003 server only (through OWA/DAV)
  - basically no active maintenance

evolution-mapi
   - for 2003,2007,2010 servers (through RPC/MAPI over TCP
     (no Outlook-anywhere/RPC-over-HTTP allowed (yet) - it currently
     waits on samba implementation of it))
   - I maintain it - I guess semi-actively, planned to move
     to evolution-ews

evolution-ews
   - for 2007,2010 servers (through https, with simpler dependencies)
   - it's currently semi-maintained
   - note the EWS implementation on Exchange servers is not feature
     complete on 2007 servers (I read/saw some articles about it some
     time ago)

evolution-activesync
   - basically for any server (not only exchange?) which supports
     ActiveSync protocol - like GMail, exchange 2007,2010
   - currently very fresh, supports only mails

That said, I would deprecate evolution-exchange, but only from active
maintenance, we still want to support it, as it's proved as working by
years and its users. The passive maintenance will be only consisting in
basic functionality testing and making sure it is compileable with
current eds/evo (testing after changes). I know it's more work for you,
Matthew, but I also believe that once the API changes will be finished
(after 3.6.0), the whole passive maintenance will be a toy, with less
frequent releases than on the other projects.

Do I make sense? I hope I do :)
	Bye,
	Milan