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

["B. Joshua Rosen" <bjrosen polybus com>]

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:
>
> > 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.

In my case it's Evolution not the router, killing Evolution and
restarting it fixes the problem. The symptom is the Password dialog
which pops up when it gets into this state. Putting in the password just
causes the dialog to pop up again. I filed a bug report on this over a
year ago, it was never resolved.

> > 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.

It's not the number of vFolders, I just have a few (although I do have a
hundred of old fashion regular folders), it's the number of e-mails. I
have gigabytes of mail, I keep everything except for SPAM and things
like this. The performance is fine in Fedora 9 (.22) but it went to hell
in F10 and is just as bad or worse in F11 (.26). I've kept my desktop at
F9 because of the Evolution problems. My servers and my laptop are
running F11. The servers aren't an issue because the only applications I
run on them are Xemacs, Verilog simulation, FPGA tools and KVM virtual
machines which I use to run CentOS on top of F11 (F11 gives me hardware
compatibility, CentOS gives me software compatibility). The laptop is
running F11 because I need a recent kernel for my wireless card. Using
Evolution on the laptop is a painful experience because of all the bugs
in the .26 version, fortunately I only have to put up with it for a few
days a month when I'm out of town. The other really broken piece of
software is NetworkManager, but unlike Evolution you don't need
NetworkManager most of the time. I disable NetworkManager unless I am
using a wireless connection (which is rare).

> > 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.

There are a few things I would like to see also, like the ability to
merge different contact lists and to easily prune duplicates. But until
Evolution gets back to a stable state I don't think any effort should be
spent on adding even a single new feature. The first priority is to get
a version of Evolution that works. I haven't been able to export my
Evolution e-mail database into any other E-mail program. Kmail crashes
when it tries to convert my database and Opera mail doesn't have an
import function.  

-- 
B. Joshua Rosen, VP
Polybus Systems Corp
23 Providence Rd
Westford, MA 01886
Phone: (978) 692-4828
Cell: (978) 828-0944
FAX: (978) 692-7557