Re: [Evolution] Evolution-list Digest, Vol 51, Issue 20

[Tim McConnell <timothy mcconnell comcast net>]

On Mon, 2009-10-12 at 03:57 +0000, evolution-list-request gnome org
wrote:

> Matthew and the other developers,
>
> I think it's a terrible mistake to be adding any new features to
> Evolution until the bugs have been fixed. Nobody cares about
> customizable toolbars or keyboard shortcuts, those things can wait.
> Evolution is in a terrible state at the moment. It crashes all of the
> time, it should never crash. It loses the ability to talk to pop server
> after 24 hours (at least it loses the ability to talk to Comcast's
> servers) which necessitates restarting the app.

I don't know if it is Comcast's servers Evo is losing connectivity to; I
have Comcast and most of the time I have to power cycle the router (darn
Linksys anyway) to regain connectivity. 
>  And virtual folders is
> completely broken. Virtual folders is a really important feature, unlike
> trivial things like customizable toolbars, and more importantly it
> worked fine for years until the changes in 2.24.
+1 for that fix.... PLEASE!? 
> The most important things to users are,
>
> 1) Reliablity. A program should work all of the time, it should never
> crash or hang. Nothing else matters if a program is as unstable as
> Evolution has become.
I have F11 fully updated and it never crashes or hangs for me. Maybe Poc
could tell how to restart GNOME and you could run GDB on GNOME (to
ensure it is actually a problem with Evo and not another process that is
causing the problem.) to see where it hangs/freezes on you. There is a
link in the FAQ's on what to install for proper debugging. 

> 2) Speed. Once a program is reliable the next most important thing is
> speed, ideally every thing should be instantaneous. Evolution has gotten
> slower and slower. In Fedora 11 it takes 10 minutes to sort through the
> virtual folders when it's opened, and if it has to convert from and
> earlier version it can take a full day (on a Core2, God knows how long
> it takes on older hardware) to do the conversion.

How many vfolders do you have? I have 46 with sub-folders in three of
them and it takes me less than a minute to start Evo. 
> 3) Features. This is dead last especially in the case of Evolution which
> is already very feature rich. 
Don't really agree with that statement, a "feature" I have seen multiple
requests for is the ability to easily edit the filters/ message rules. I
would love to see that happen.

> The Evolution team should devote the next year fixing it's bugs and then
> getting the performance back to where it was. Once that's done you can
> consider new functionality.
Hence the Bonobo problem and it removal should fix alot of the current
issues. But if you are any good at programming I'm sure they wouldn't
complain about code submissions. ;) 
> Thanks,
>
> Josh

> > With Bonobo finally out of the way, you'll get the configurable keyboard
> > shortcuts in 2.29.1, and customizable toolbars are now feasible (but not
> > yet a priority -- we've got some bigger fish to fry first).
> >
> > Also, I and I think most of the other developers -do- read the list.  We
> > just tend to refrain from participating in the same tired old arguments
> > about email etiquette and how the project is going down the tubes.
> >
> > That said, a little more reassurance from us that we're still here and
> > we're listening would not be a bad thing.
And please keep up the good work :) 
> > Matthew Barnes


> I agree. While it's true that I haven't seen many crashes in recent
> versions, Evo does hang more often than one would like (though again,
> less than it used to). Frequently these hangs are network-related and
> eventually go away, but sometimes they don't. Just yesterday I found Evo
> trying to update folders from a couple of IMAP servers where it had
> clearly been sitting *all night* without timing out or getting an
> answer. When I killed and restarted it, the servers responded and
> everything was fine. Evo has been like this in every version since I
> started using it something like 8 years ago. It doesn't seem able to
> cope well with servers timing out or networks disconnecting.
If you are using Fedora you can thank Network Manager for that one. I
lose connectivity and get no notification of the loss when using that. 
> Perhaps the most frustrating thing is that when it gets into this state
> you can't even kill it wihout going to a terminal as it won't respond to
> Quit or Work Offline.
Yeah opening a terminal and typing evolution --force-shutdown isn't a
well known thing when you first start using Evo. And it should shutdown
the program when the "force quit or continue" message dialog box
appears. 

> poc