[HC Evolution] Workers of the world, Evolve!

[Dan Winship <danw helixcode com>]

Hi. Welcome to the Evolution mailing list, those who have posted and
those who have not.

If you'd like to help out with Evolution development, here's what you
can do:

1) Read the Evolution white papers at http://www.helixcode.com/tech/

2) Check the Evolution source code out of GNOME CVS. There's
   information about how to use GNOME CVS at
   http://developers.gnome.org/tools/cvs.html. Evolution is in the
   "evolution" module. (The white papers are in
   evolution/doc/white-papers.)

3) Browse the source. Some of it is well-documented, and some is not.
   We hope to add more comments/documentation soon, but are hesitating
   until we're sure the interfaces are stable.

   Note that the Camel library is intentionally quite a bit like
   JavaMail, so reading the JavaMail docs
   (http://java.sun.com/products/javamail/) can give you some insight
   on it.

4) Build the source... ?

   You need a lot of GNOME libraries to build Evolution. A partial
   list of non-core libraries is: bonobo, gdk-pixbuf, gnome-print,
   gnome-vfs, gtkhtml, libglade, and libunicode. (These are all in
   GNOME CVS.)

   You will also need a recent copy of ORBit. The version in the Helix
   GNOME preview release is new enough. If you don't have that, you
   should check out ORBit from GNOME CVS with the option
   "-r orbit-stable-0-5" to get the recent stable branch.

   Evolution does not currently build all the time. (Right now the
   calendar component is broken.) Such are the joys of pre-beta
   software.

5) Run the binaries ????

   Just because you manage to build it doesn't mean it will work. :-)

   And even when they work, they don't always do much. (This is
   especially true of the mailer at this point.)

   As a helpful hint: debugging Bonobo components can be "fun". If you
   start the program and it crashes, it may leave some Bonobo
   components running in an unstable state. So you'll have to ps and
   kill them.

6) Send us code!

   If you find bugs, please send patches.

   If you'd like to work on some part of the code, send mail here to
   avoid duplicating effort. (And to avoid writing it against some
   spec that we're planning to change.)

-- Dan