Re: [Evolution] Evolution on Solaris

[Mark Gordon <mtgordon ximian com>]

On Thu, 2003-07-24 at 09:18, Michael-John Anthony wrote:
> On Tue, 2003-07-22 at 03:17, Mark Gordon wrote:
> > On Mon, 2003-07-21 at 10:37, Tim Longo wrote:
> > > So, it would seem that Evolution is no longer available for Solaris? Is that true? I suppose it makes 
> > > sense, but for the few of us that still use a Solaris desktop w/Evolution, it's bad.
> >
> > Solaris is sufficiently different from Linux that the Solaris release of
> > 1.4 requires a great deal of additional work beyond what was necessary
> > for the 1.4 release on Linux.  It's definitely in the works, though.
>
> How so?
>
>    - Michael-John.

1) We've always provided rpms for Solaris, which is a bit of a square
peg, but we need the dependency handling.
2) We're depending on Sun GNOME 2, but we needed to figure out how to do
that properly in the context of rpm.
3) We need an installer to bootstrap the install process.  Installing
rpms on a system for which it's not the native package management system
presents a chicken-egg problem.  We've done this with previous
installers, but the current installer (used for XD2) needed some
modifications in order to work properly under Solaris.
4) Various changes had to be made to the packages to get them working
with the Sun GNOME packages, including adding a few more packages that
we hadn't originally expected to be necessary.  Complications included
an assortment of prefixes for libraries, versioning issues, etc.

The problems are mostly related to release engineering rather than any
inherent portability issues in Evolution, if that's what you're asking.

-Mark Gordon