On Fri, 2007-08-24 at 09:03 +0100, Peter Saffrey wrote:
Or, you can build the latest version yourself if you want to go that route. It's not trivial but it's not too bad.
I've had a quick go at this. Evo 2.12 is not available from the main downloads page: http://www.gnome.org/projects/evolution/download.shtml
As others have mentioned, until the code is released you won't be able to download prebuilt versions. That's why I said above you need to build it.
So I used svn to get the latest version. This required a little guess work since the svn instructions were generic to Gnome and I only wanted Evolution.
Reid has given you a pointer to specific Evo instructions. These could have also been found via Google very quickly, with a search like "build evolution from svn", where the page Reid references will be the first thing that shows up.
The compilation instructions were generic GNU instructions and said there would be a configure script, which there wasn't. I tried make but it said no targets. I tried running "./autogen.sh" and it said "You need to install gnome-common from the GNOME CVS" - this is probably because I'm trying to build in a user directory so I don't overwrite the old version.
Gnome is a very large suite of applications, and Evolution is one part of that, and uses a large number of base Gnome libraries. This means that to compile Evo you have to have the developer packages for all the Gnome libraries that Evo needs. Be default on modern distributions these are not included, since they're not usually needed and they take up a lot of disk space. However, they ARE packaged and they can easily be installed (once you know what to do).
I don't want to spend hours fighting with it, so I guess I'll just wait for the package version of 2.12 to come out in October.
Based on a info from the web and a lot of help from people like Reid,
I've created a makefile that should make this pretty simple; this is how
I do it:
sudo mkdir /opt/evo-src /opt/evo
sudo chown $USER /opt/evo-src /opt/evo
cd /opt/evo-src
cp ~/Makefile .
make
It will do everything for you, including checking out the SVN versions
of libsoup, gtkhtml, evolution-*, then configuring, building, and
installing, all in the right order.
The nice thing about using make is that next week (or tomorrow) you can
run "make" again, and it will check if there have been any updates to
any of the SVN code and if so, update it, redo the configuration,
install, etc. for the parts that are changed.
It works quite well, IME. My only caveat is that the check to see
whether you have all the packages installed you need (the check-prereqs
target) is (a) specific to Ubuntu 7.04, and (b) might not list
everything you actually need, since I (stupidly) didn't jot down all the
packages I needed to install when I did it first. If you have changes
or updates, please let me know!
You can also see if there are updates without doing anything else with:
make check-updates
And finally, you can view the ChangeLog updates since your last build
(more info than just knowing which files changed) with:
make check-changelog
I must say, it's these kind of problems that made it a relief to move from Linux to Windows a year ago. A working PIM seems like a pretty fundamental part of a modern OS, but Evolution is the only choice under Linux and it's flaky and unreliable. Even if you've got plenty of experience building software, missing or inadequate documentation means it's always a struggle. I guess it's too much to expect that Linux software will eventually have the "it just works" quality, but I keep hoping.
I understand your frustration but really, these kinds of comments aren't
helpful. I agree that Evolution's support of Exchange has had a long
and rocky road; in fact until last summer I was using a complex setup
where I would use fetchmail to download all messages from my Exchange
server via IMAP, EXCEPT meeting requests, then I would use Evo's
Exchange support ONLY to handle my shared calendar.
Even given a few annoying things that still exist in the current SVN
codebase (some of which I still hope will be fixed before 2.12 is
released), 2.12 is much, much better than any previous version. I can't
address your "super slow" issue directly, except to say that I
definitely try to avoid having too many messages in any given folder; my
largest folder is "Deleted Items" with 2300 messages; my largest
"regular" folder has <500 messages. I don't know if that's an issue for
you.
I do hope you try my makefile (or the instructions Reid pointed you to)
and see if your problem is fixed or not. If not, it would be great if
you could help the Evo developers find and fix your issues.
Let me just make a few points to your general statement though:
* Almost everything in Linux really DOES "just work" these days,
maybe not quite as easily as a Mac, with it's restricted
hardware platform support, but certainly at least as well as
Windows.
* The places where things don't "just work" are almost exclusively
due to interacting with proprietary environments; there's only
so much people can do in the face of unpublished 3rd party
interfaces. Evolution is a fine mail client for standard
protocols like POP, IMAP, etc. It doesn't work that well for
proprietary, unpublished interfaces like Exchange. It sucks but
where does the blame really lie here? I realize that assigning
blame doesn't make broken things work better, and I sympathize
with that point of view, but at the same time you have to vent
your frustrations in the right direction.
* Building packages from source is NOT intended to be trivial and
plug-n-play, unless you go to a distro like Gentoo (and they
have their own problems). That's why we have distributions.
You may be frustrated that it was not simple but consider this:
when was the last time Microsoft offered to let you build their
current codebase so you could work around a bug in their
software?
Anyway, good luck and let me know if you have problems with my makefile.
--
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Paul D. Smith <psmith gnu org> http://make.paulandlesley.org
"Please remain calm--I may be mad, but I am a professional."--Mad Scientist
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