[Evolution] Evolution wants you!

[Ettore Perazzoli <ettore ximian com>]

Hello GNOMErs,

As you may have noticed already, Evolution has finally reached, after
over 22 months of development, Beta (i.e. feature-frozen) status.

The project is in great shape right now.  With almost 700k lines of
code and 14 full-time developers, we are building one of the most
advanced GNOME applications ever, as well as one of the biggest
end-user free software efforts to date.  It is also getting pretty
stable and usable; many people are using it for their day-to-day work,
and we have gained many devotees from the rows of users of other mail
applications.

We Evolution hackers are extremely proud of what we have achieved so
far, and we hope we are keeping up with the expectations of the whole
GNOME community in providing what we believe is the most advanced free
groupware application available today.  Evolution features a full
mailer with IMAP, POP, S/IMAP, message indexing, PGP, and HTML
support.  The Evolution calendar and addressbook sync with PalmOS
devices, support LDAP, vCard, iCal and vCal and are fully integrated
with the mailer.  You can even schedule appointments with Outlook
clients.  Evolution is also based on the Bonobo component model and is
extremely flexible and extensible.

But of course, we are not quite done yet.  A few weeks of intense
hacking and bug smashing are ahead of us, in order to meet our goal of
deploying a 1.0 release that is polished and completely crash-free.


THE SCHEDULE
------------

Here is the current schedule for 1.0:

  * Beta 2, Aug 2nd  [We are here :-)]

  * Beta 3, Aug 14th, Performance and UI Freeze.

  * Beta 4, Sep 5th

  * Release Candidate 1, Sep 18th

  * Final 1.0 Release, October 1st


HOW YOU CAN CONTRIBUTE
----------------------

We would like to encourage the whole GNOME community to start playing
with Evolution right now, and contribute to the effort by providing
testing, bug reports and, why not, fixes.  We believe Evolution will
play an important role in making the GNOME platform more and more
popular.

Here is a bunch of links to help you out:

  * Evolution web page: http://www.ximian.com/apps/evolution.php3

  * For Ximian GNOME users, the latest Evolution Beta release is
    always available through Red Carpet in the "Ximian Preview" and
    "Evolution Snapshot" channels.

  * If you don't have Ximian GNOME installed, you can download the
    latest GtkHTML, GAL and Evolution tarballs from
    ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/unstable, or
    ftp://ftp.ximian.com/pub/source/evolution .  And of course, all
    the code is also available from the GNOME CVS (modules gal, 
    gtkhtml and evolution).

  * Mailing lists: evolution ximian com and
    evolution-hackers ximian com   Send the usual `subscribe' message
    to evolution-request ximian com or
    evolution-hackers-request ximian com to subscribe.

  * The FAQ is located at http://www.ximian.com/apps/evolution-faq.html

  * Our Bugzilla-based bug tracking system is located at
    http://bugzilla.ximian.com.  Please report all the bugs there, and
    they'll be taken good care of.  Notice you can also use Bug-Buddy
    to submit bugs into the bug tracker; this is useful for quickly
    reporting crashes or sending bug reports when you are off-line.

  * Every week on Thursday, approximately from 9am to 9pm EST, bug
    days take place on #evobugs on irc.gnome.org.  This is a good
    opportunity to talk to the developers, help them to figure out
    bugs they cannot reproduce, etc.

Thank you all!  We are looking forward to your feedback.

-- 
Ettore