Re: [Evolution] a challenge to the developers

[Adam Tauno Williams <awilliam opengroupware us>]

On Mon, 2009-11-16 at 08:24 -0430, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
> 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.

A 'free software project' is ultimately, like *everything* else in life,
guided by the contributions; whether those contributions are motivated
by fiduciary remuneration or anything else. 

> 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.

Maybe nobody else experiences this?  I've not ever had Evolution
hard-freeze that I can recall.  Occasionally I've seen it run into an
apparent file-lock bug with Beagle, but that is just about the only
freeze I've seen.  It doesn't handle network issues very gracefully, but
none of the apps I have do [ as a developer I know that doing so is
really very extremely hard ]. Watch Outlook after a network issue, it
typically goes bat-crap crazy; way more developers work on Outlook than
Evolution.

> 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.

I'd prefer they write and debug code.

> Unfortunately the various roadmaps, version by version, say nothing
> about prioritizing bugs, only about adding features.

Because that is what a roadmap is.  Where is there a roadmap, for any
project, that talks about bugs?

> 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.

Dude, pay attention to the list.  They just did a complete port off of
Bonobo, which was a big change to the underlying architecture.  Clearly
someone is investing a lot of energy into it.

And Evolution remains, as it has been for many years, THE premiere Open
Source mail client and PIM.  There is nothing else that comes close to
the functionality and stability provided by Evolution.  The closest is
probably Thunderbird [known around the office as 'Thunderous Turd'], and
talk about issues.... That is a distant second to Evolution.