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Re: [Evolution] Request for additions/corrections in Evolution

On Mon, 2002-05-27 at 14:37, Raider wrote:

My fist complaint (or did I miss something?) is that I want to use
another editor than the default.  How can this be done?

It can't.


      Why?


because no one has implemented it?




You dont seem to have any real reasons why the editor is unusable
though.  Personally i'd like to use emacs, or even vi, but i can't
*shrug*, its still adequate.


      I'd go for gvim.  Which is more flexible and can be even "scripted" to
do what you want.


then use gvim to compose a message body and paste it into the editor.



      Anyway, I didn't say it is unusable.  It still has problems.  As you
can see mostly aestetic reasons, don't know much about the insides.

      Talking about which... okay, it doesn't know how to use an external
editor.  Than are you aware of such a hack?  I heard about such a
project but I also heard it makes evolution crash quite often as wel.


yes, there is a hack around somewhere. do a search on google.




And here comes my list of problems with the editor.
1. There's no word wrap setting (not to my knowledge).  I'd be grateful
if somebody will point me that "missing" option.

You mean setting the mode to 'normal' or 'preformat'?


      Hmm... from what I see normal means wrapped, preformat means
unwrapped.  This isn't enough as it only works for my text and not for
the quoted part.  See... yahoo.com for example gives you the full
sentence/phrase/paragraph untill the user pushed newline.  For the user
of yahoo.com there's nothing wrong.  For me... answering with Evolution
is a real pain as I have to break the text line by line.  There are
sittuations (say a long URL) where this shouldn't happen.  But that
wrapping feature should be there, should be settable...


The composer is designed to not auto-wrap quoted paragraphs because
there may be a need for them to not be wrapped. Anyways, there is
already a feature request about this afaik.




You mean setting the 'normal' option?


      Okay.  How can I set the normal option.  All I find is a list where I
can set the fonts for fixed/variable width on screen and on print.  Than
the shortcuts... and the spell checking.  Where is that "number"?


what number? the number of characters per line? You can't.




I guess because its changing the text from preformat to 'normal'.  Its a
different paragraph, and its being done in html, so you get an extra
line becuse you've inserted 'normal' between two 'pre' blocks.


      My text is plain text.  My friend's text is also plain text.  Do you
mean Evolution does some sort of conversion behind the scenes
text->HTML->text?


yes. GtkHTML is an html editor.




Not really.  '>' at the beggining of the original text means a quote. 
It is no longer the original text because you've changed it.  You
wouldn't expect to type '> blah' on a line by itself and have it
magically changed to a quote, would you?


      There are different types of quotes around.  Some use '#'.  Others the
first letters of the author's user name than the '>'.  Anyway, my point
is if I'm writing a large reply and use that colour part my text isn't
clearly divided into "quotes" and "answers".  Meaning if you choose
coloring the usability of the editor decreases.


I don't see how this has anything to do with anything.



Problem solved in an elegant manner.


Once you hit return to modify the quoted text, it's no longer our
problem. You've modified it, you get to deal with it.




7. As an addition to the previous problem, actually a combination of the
previous two, if I manually add the '>' sign to the beginning of the
line it will show as normal text and the rest will be as quote.  I know,
one solution would be to turn this different coloring off.  But this
doesn't mean that part doesn't need improvement.

Doesn't sound terribly life threatening to me.  Especially when there
are real bugs to fix.


      Oh... of course.  But for about the same type of functionality (or even
more flexibility) I can get mailx... now... we're not getting anywhere
with this type of attitute.

      You said there are real bugs to fix... Hmm... what kind of software is
this?  My evolution is labeled 1.0.2.  I see 1.0.5 is out.  IMHO 1.x
means STABLE.  Like in no bugs.  Is this some sort of beta like with
microsoft?  This means Evolution will get stable at what release? 5.x? 
This isn't sarcasm.  I'm really curious.  Even Mozilla has v1.0.0 rc...
meaning release candidade where the features are fixed than people try
to kill as many bugs as possible... than you have a new rc... and so on
till you sqash them all.


I guess this must mean that the Linux kernel must be so bug free that it
is 2.4 * no-bugs, huh? Give me a break.

All complex software has bugs. There's no way to make that not so. If
you think there is, then please enlighten us. Perhaps you should get
involved and start writing this perfect bug-free code of which you
speak.




Why no names?


      Solved the problem in this new mail - I give names and descriptions ;-)


I'd rather it worked the way it does, personally.  Its more like a plain
old editor (e.g. emacs, vi), which is what i'm used to, not some silly
'smart' editor which gets in the way of what you're trying to do.


      Hmm... I disagree with you.  See... gvim is smart.  And you can teach
it a lot of things.  Evolution's editor seems smart, pretends to be
smart (spell checking, colors and other things as well) and it isn't
that good.  I mean is 1.0.x considered development branch?  Else, that
coloring stuff shouldn't be in this release, because it is done half
right.


No one else seems to have complained.




Perhaps you're only sending as text and its recoving from a text
message, in which case I think it loses most formatting information. 
Although i'm not really sure on this one.


      Well.. it shouldn't.  \t should remain \t, \n should remain \n and so
on.  This recovery part is extremely useful.  But why doesn't it
remember all?  Back to gvim - (as well as vim) it remembers formatting
as well.


remember that GtkHTML is not a plain-text editor, it is an HTML editor.
Which means that you must convert plain-text back into HTML. This is a
non-perfect translation. There's no way to make it perfect, which is why
we now save drafts in HTML always (even if you choose to only send
plain-text mail) this way formatting is preserved.




I'm not sure, perhaps this is being worked on too.  The quotation stuff
has been developed lately, as I said above.  Again, it doesn't appear to
be a show-stopper bug.


      What is it doing in the "stable" release.  Or is 1.0.x a development
branch?


It works fine enough to be in the stable release? Like I said above, no
one else seems to mind. You're the only one who has complined about it.




11. I see the editor has a hard time with highlighting addresses as
well.  It highlights even the '>' or the dot that belongs to the end of
phrase.

Sounds like the end of the world to me!


      Sounds like a nuisance.  There's no place for sarcasm here IMHO.  This
is a serious problem.  If the code is that bad it can't handle addresses
right, than don't add it.  The viewer's part is okay.  The editor's part
is broken.  Why is than this feature enabled in the editor as well?


Why don't you send us a patch? Then we can all be happy :-)




So why bother about any of the colouring stuff?  It all gets dropped as 
soon as you send it anyway.  Like, who really cares what it looks like
on the screen, just set the quote colour to the same as the text colour
and be done with it?  It seems to be an awful lot of niggling over
something which doesn't even mean anything.


      Why?  Even pine which uses ncurses knows this stuff.


Huh? what does this got to do with anything? The quoting colours are not
sent via email, each program has to identify what the quoted paragraphs
are and colouise them itself. Pine's quoting has nothing to do with
Evolution's quoting and vise versa.



      And I DO CARE how things look on my screen.  Or else I won't go that
far and spend time with a wordish editor.  Really, your model seems to
me (please correct me if I'm wrong) Outlook.  But instead of improving
things the teams seems to try to make a clone and nothing more.  Maybe
the aim is a bugless clone, but still, no surface improvements. 
Actually a crippled version of Outlook as you miss scripting.


Thank you for throwing insults at us left and right. That's always a
sure way to win people over and make them do things for you.

Instead of insulting us, why not start writing code and helping out? You
seem to think you could do better. "Put your code where your mouth is"
as they say.




You should probably just keep using procmail then.  If you use a maildir
store, evolution works just fine with it.


      My thoughts exactly.  Now how do I hack into this beast and make it
pipe the mail it gets into procmail and ignore its filtering code if
possible.  Because at this point I'd hate to have my resources wasted
with redundant parts.


Just make fetchmail download your mail and use procmail as normal. No
need to have Evolution pipe it to anything.




You *could* enter the rules (you can basically do anything) as complex
s-expressions, but that isn't documented and liable to change anyway.


      Okay.  Sounds good.  Can you give me some examples?  Or at least point
me some man pages, info pages, web pages, whatever about this?


read the source code and/or the filtertypes.xml file in ~/evolution for
examples.



      What does "liable to change" anyway?  That I might lose a night hacking
the XML to find out that if I upgrade the new Evolution will crash?


No, it means that the expressions may change some day. They won't change
in any 1.0.x release. They have already been extended in the 1.1.x
development branch (but older rules will still work).




Just stick to procmail I guess.  The filters werent' designed for this
type of mess.  You can't implement goto's in the s-expressions either.


      That was an alternative.  Quick.  Dirty.  A hack.  From how things are
now I can't make rule 15 that the messages it receives is the result of
rule 10 and not the result of rule 8.  This while keeping this primitive
"if all" and "if any" way of grouping.


Just use maildir and point evolution to the maildir tree.

You can use mbox trees as well (at least in 1.1), but they're not as
efficient.


      I have a problem here.  With Evolution I don't need to bother with a
mail server and I don't have to bother with fetchmail as well.  How can
I make Evolution feed procmail via pipe the messages?  Don't tell me
I'll have to reinstall fetchmail and sendmail.


Yep, you'll have to reinstall fetchmail. I don't see why you'd need to
install Sendmail though.




We use the timeouts that the operating system gives us for tcp
connections.  Tcp timeouts take a while, and we dont know about them
till the OS tells us.  This is how we 'monitor' the connection.  I dont
think there's any way to do more than this in an portable way, as we are
abstracted from the hardware by the operating system.


      Okay.  So this is one thing to complain some place else.  It's good to
know.  Can you tell me which developer group is dealing with this
issue?  Just in case you know of course.


The linux kernel hackers maybe? :-)




The cancel button might work on the main display, then again it might
not, i'm not too sure on this one.


      It works.  Or the Mandrake team is modifying sources?


He meant that he couldn't remember if it would cancel the send or not. I
wasn't 100% sure either, but if you say it works then it works. The
Mandrake team didn't modify the code any at all afaik.




Well, its because its 'send now',  that means 'send now'.  It doesn't
mean 'send when you can'.  If you want to do that, you should use 'send
later', and use the send/receive button.


      Yea. I know that.  But make it smarter.  The way you put it, the poor
idiot that came with the idea of sent mail and outbox should be fired. 
As you can just make one mail folder and set a flag as "sent" "waiting
to be sent" "broken"...


It should be launching a background thread to perform the sending
anyway, not hanging the application.


      I had to kill the app.  Because even if I reconnected Evolution was
unable to recover.


If it'll make you feel any better from being so upset, here's a flower
:)

  @>-,-`-,---


      Ah.  I see the thorns.


You dont click on them.  i.e. you can't.  You can probably hide them
from the gui by removing their directories in ~/evolution//local, but
some parts will still load anyway in certain circumstances.


      I don't want to hide them.  This is what I make on windoze.  I pretend
not to see all the useless apps that are launched.  Over here... why
load them by default?  Just because Ximian could put a label "oh, see,
our code is as resource greedy as your Outlook so try your new Itanium
with this to see we're just as slow as our competition"?  Strange.  Why
load them?


Again, thank you for insulting us.




This i couldn't agree on more.  For some reason the UI 'gods' think that
its better not to know the email address.  I'd like it changed but I
can't imagine it happening while there are bigger problems to fix. 
Still, its not really the end of the world either, but you could always
try submitting a patch.


      There are people whom get lost when they see all those chars.  They
just rightclick a mail from Johnsey and they send a mail to Johnsey,
thinking of j smith x com is a dreadful thought for their hamburger-like
IQ.  But there has to be an option lost somewhere.  Where the default is
like this, and me and you can just check it and we're back to what we
want/know.

      About the patch: first I don't know I'm that good.  I give you credit
for the work you do and I respect you (you said you're one of the
developers).  Than... what makes you sure my patch will be accepted? 
And just keeping with the latest version to provide a patch is way over
my resources.  I don't have the time.  And I don't have the line to get
from Ximian every latest version.  This is why I stick with the MDK8.2
defaults in the first place.


We can't guarentee that the patch will make it in, but if your patch is
well written and clean (ie, no kludgy hacks) then odds are we'd accept
it.




You can goto the mail config and disable the accounts easily.  It was
done that way specifically for this reason (well, among others, but it
was a high priority reason).


      Okay.  If I disable them, how do I collect the mail?  By enabling
them?  If this is the answer don't bother, it would be the lamest
answer, just to prove some code might work.  Again, names: Eudora has a
list with the accounts.  If there is a POP/IMAP server/account mentioned
than this is in the list.  You have a flag to set in order that the
"check mail" function takes into consideration that particual account. 
And for the rest - right click and chose "get mail".  As easy as that. 
Can Evolution do that?


Feel free to submit patches.

Jeff
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