Re: [Evolution] Evolution Exchange in Ubuntu Hardy

[Paul Smith <paul mad-scientist us>]

On Fri, 2008-05-23 at 10:32 -0400, Barry D. Hassler wrote:
> I've given this almost a month to see if there would be any updates,
> but it's so bad, I've actually regressed several years, and am now
> depending on Outlook running on my (virtual) Windows XP system. I'm
> going to try building from source, but previous attempts at that were
> unsuccessful (or more realistically, too time consuming)

Unfortunately you don't say exactly what "so bad" means.  For the first
week or so of Hardy, Evo was unusable; no question.  After that some
updates were made that greatly stabilized the program.  However, it's
still losing connection with the backend server consistently for me
(that is, on the order of once to as many as 6-7 times a day).ï  You can
find more info about this particular problem here:

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=512605

I've been working with the Evo team to try to debug this: on their
advice I've been running the Exchange backend under valgrind for 3-4
days (which is a bit painful!) and I've found a number of smaller
problems that were not causing the Exchange backend crash.

However, yesterday I found the real bug.  It turns out this is a bug in
OpenLDAP, which is what is used to connect to the Exchange Global
Address List, and not in Evo Exchange at all.  Note that Evo Exchange
does lookups in GAL at lots of different times, NOT just when you're
using the contact list.  I sent a detailed bug report to the OpenLDAP
folks last night and they already have a patch committed to their
codebase:

http://www.openldap.org/its/index.cgi/Incoming?id=5525;page=1;statetype=1

and Chuck Short has already created a PPA build for the Ubunutu libldap
packages that incorporate this change:

https://launchpad.net/~zulcss/+archive

So!  If this is the problem you're seeing (losing connection with the
Exchange backend) you can either try adding this PPA to your sources and
installing it, or you can just sit tight for a bit until the fix is
confirmed and patched versions make it into Ubuntu Hardy proper.

This won't fix everything, but I hope this will squash a lot of the
remaining instability.  This is definitely the only recurring, serious
issue I've been seeing with my latest packages in Hardy.