Re: [Evolution] a challenge to the developers

[Patrick O'Callaghan <poc usb ve>]

On Mon, 2009-11-16 at 12:22 +0200, Tor Lillqvist wrote:
> > So here is my challenge to the evolution development team:
>
> I am sure the team is fully challenged already. You are directing your
> challenge at the wrong address. It would make more sense to challenge
> the team's employers (various Linux distros). It's they who decide
> what the team works on. Companies like a challenge to be spiced up
> with a reward. You know, like, "make sure these bugs get fixed and we
> will purchase 1000 support contracts/subscriptions/etc".

While bounties can be useful in limited contexts, I don't think a free
(in both senses) software project can be guided only by interested
parties offering money.

My personal gripe is that Evo occasionally freezes so badly that only a
forced shutdown will kill it. I've reported this repeatedly with
previous versions, both on this list and via BZ, sent in traces etc.
etc., but although the frequency has gone down it still happens. I had
high hopes for 2.28 when I installed it a week or so ago, but it just
froze on me twice in less than a day. The freezes are fairly obviously
related to network problems (I've posted about this before), so maybe
it's true that a radical rewrite is necessary to fix them. No doubt
other people also have their own pet peeves.

It would be nice to hear someone on the devel team say what the worst
bugs are thought to be and explain what they propose to do about them.
Unfortunately the various roadmaps, version by version, say nothing
about prioritizing bugs, only about adding features.

It's also rather depressing to see that the latest Release Notes are for
2.24 (http://projects.gnome.org/evolution/documentation.shtml) and the
latest roadmap (http://www.go-evolution.org/Evo2.26) concerns the
planning for 2.26. That version was released more than 6 months ago, so
the planning must have happened several months earlier. It's hard to
avoid the impression that Evo is struggling. I really hope I'm wrong.

poc