Re: [Evolution] Slow response

[Peter Saffrey <pzs dcs gla ac uk>]

Hi there,

First of all, I apologise for the negative comments in my previous post
- Paul was absolutely right about them being unhelpful. Evolution is an
impressive tool, and it is hardly fair to blame it for struggling to
have perfect interaction with a proprietary mail service, especially one
provided by Microsoft. Last time I was based under Linux I was content
with Pine, so I really can't complain!

In any case, the Evolution community has put me to shame by responding
to my vitriol with many courteous and helpful responses. As a result,
I've had another go at this and made some progress, although I'm still
not quite there.

First of all, I tried Tobias Mueller's solution of adding the Gutsy
repositories, but this required that I upgrade a lot of the underlying
libraries, and I'd prefer to maintain a stable system within Feisty as
much as I can.

Then I tried the Makefile provided by Paul Smith. This is indeed a very
clever piece of software and it did most of the installation for me.
There were a few problems, however.

- I found that it didn't report missing packages from the second line of
the "PREREQS" definition; I needed to install bison and flex but it
didn't give these names, only that I didn't have all the packages I
needed. I'm not sure why this would be...

- The libgail-dev package was needed, but not listed.

There were more substantial problems installing the evolution-exchange
module. First of all, I had a problem where packages for evolution-shell
and evolution-plugin were not being found at configure time, because
PKG_CONFIG_PATH was set to look in /usr/lib/pkgconfig, which did not
contain the evolution packages I had just built. 

After some bodging with symbolic links I ended up fixing this by
changing the definition of PKG_CONFIG_PATH in your Makefile to this:

PKG_CONFIG_PATH := 
/opt/evo-src/evolution/:/opt/evo-src/evolution-data-server/addressbook/libebook/:/opt/evo-src/evolution-data-server/addressbook/libedata-book/:/opt/evo-src/evolution-data-server/calendar/libedata-cal/:/opt/evo-src/evolution-data-server/calendar/libecal/:/opt/evo-src/evolution-data-server/libedataserverui/:/opt/evo-src/libsoup:/opt/evo-src/evolution-data-server/servers/exchange/storage

which I realise is very ugly, but everything else seemed worse. I wonder
whether these package files can be collected together somewhere, but I
guess this problem is part of installing a development copy of Evo
alongside an existing, which must be reasonably unusual. 

I then ran into the problem at link time partly documented in your
Makefile with libeshell.so. I fixed this like this:

http://www.mail-archive.com/evolution-hackers gnome org/msg01879.html

Then there were problems at install time, when the Makefilefor Camel in
the evolution-exchange directory had not taken on the proper prefix and
was attempting to copy the various urls into /usr/lib
($CAMEL_providerdir). I fixed that by manually hacking the Makefile.

I then got some missing shared object file problems rather like this
one:

http://lists.ximian.com/pipermail/connector/2004-October/000448.html

which I solved by adding to /etc/ld.so.conf and running ldconfig -
again, I can't believe this is the best method for this.

After all this, I'm afraid it still doesn't run. Using your script, it
starts up but then gives a dialog with this error message:

"Internal error, unknown error 'shell:noshell' requested"

with these messages in the log:

evolution-shell-Message: Killing old version of evolution-data-server...

(evolution:6351): e-utils-WARNING **: No parent set, or default parent
available for error dialog

Any further ideas?

Thanks again for your help so far,

Peter