Re: [Evolution] stability/stability (was: Re: Evolution-list Digest, Vol 51, Issue 20)

[Patrick O'Callaghan <poc usb ve>]

Please don't reply to digests.

1- The Subject is meaningless unless you edit it (see above)
2- It breaks the threading
3- In many cases (though not this time) clueless users quote the entire
digest in order to reply to one message.

Note that you can post via Gmane if you don't want to subscribe in the
usual way. It's not ideal either but it's better than nothing.

On Sun, 2009-10-11 at 22:40 -0600, Tim McConnell wrote:
> On Mon, 2009-10-12 at 03:57 +0000, evolution-list-request gnome org
> wrote:
[...]
> > 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. 

I don't know if "running gdb on Gnome" means anything. I can't imagine
running an entire desktop under a debugger. Maybe you mean running Evo
under gdb. That's certainly possible but probably it's easier to wait
for a freeze, then attach gdb to the process and get a stack trace. IIRC
there's info on go.evolution.org on how to do this (I've done it but I
forget at the moment, it's 1:40am :-). You then have to cut and paste
the trace output into a file and attach it to a BZ report, but it's
doable and gives the devels something to chew on.

Note that you need the debugging RPMs for Evo and everything it depends
on if the trace is to be meaningful. On Fedora, do "debuginfo-install
evolution" as root, then go and have a cup of coffee while it downloads
a zillion files.

> > 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.

What's hard about editing the filters? I'd much prefer an effort to make
it easier to dump and restore filters (e.g. on a different machine).

poc