[Evolution] New makefile for building Evolution from GIT



Hi all.

Thanks to help from Patrick and a few others, I have a new version of my
makefile to build Evolution from source, that works with the new GIT
repositories.  It currently builds the latest content of the gnome-2.28
GIT branch (I didn't try the MASTER branch since I think it's unstable
due to the bonobo stuff).  It also will build the Openchange libmapi
stuff from their source tree.

The good news is it kind of works, at least on Ubuntu Jaunty and for Evo
2.28.x.  IMAP support definitely seems stable.  Also I'm FINALLY able to
see my Exchange mailbox via MAPI (on native Jaunty Evo 2.26.1 this just
doesn't work).

And, of course, my makefile builds everything with full debugging and no
optimization, enables logging, and captures core dumps, the better to
help Evo devs improve the product.

There's a lot of bad news, though:

     1. I tried for a few days to get it to build on Ubuntu Hardy, but
        that is just too old.  The new Evo requires a lot of new
        libraries, and in particular it requires a new libxml2 library
        (newer, even, than Jaunty's) and that new library is different
        enough from the Hardy libxml2 that you have to rebuild pretty
        much everything that links it (and that Evo links)... and that's
        a LOT of stuff.  I kept adding and adding and adding Gnome
        packages to the MUSTBUILD list and finally I got tired and gave
        up, at least for now.  I'm still getting link errors trying to
        link Evolution itself.  Also, I just recently bought a new
        computer for home (arriving in the mail today!) and that one
        will be capable of running newer versions of Ubuntu (and my old
        system is being given away to someone who will want to load
        Windows XP on it)--so I'll be losing my Hardy test machine quite
        soon.  I welcome anyone else's efforts to get it working,
        though: if you want to try I'm happy to give you tips/pointers.
        It may well just be a case of continuing to add Gnome packages
        to the MUSTBUILD list until you finally get them all.
     2. The Evo I built is pretty unstable on Jaunty.  I have a bad
        feeling that this might be the same problem I'm seeing on Hardy
        (mismatched shared libraries, esp. libxml2) but while on Hardy
        it causes link errors, on Jaunty it might link OK but be causing
        runtime errors.  I'll send another email with some details about
        the core dump I seem to be seeing all the time: it's mostly the
        same one.
     3. Although I can access my Evo mailbox over MAPI, I still can't
        get either the GAL or the Calendar to work properly.  I even
        disabled my account accidentally by entering my password too
        many times so Windows Active Directory locked me out and I had
        to go to IT to get my account re-enabled :-).  I have PART of my
        calendar showing up, but not all, and attempts to use the
        address book just say "error accessing address book".  I'll send
        more info on these problems as well.

There's also the fact that Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic) will be released in just
a few weeks: it should be much simpler to build newer versions of Evo
for Karmic (a lot of these library issues should go away for example).

I didn't intentionally break support for any other distro, but I haven't
tested it there either--and the makefile got quite a bit more complex
since it needs to support building not just from GIT (for Gnome) but
from SVN (for openchange) and even from source tarballs (for things like
sqlite3 which I needed for the Hardy attempt).

So, this is more of a debugging aid at this point than a true stable
replacement.  I'm looking for folks who are intrepid and maybe know a
bit about building software and makefiles, who'd like to give it a try
and let me know what's broken/missing/etc.  If that's you let me know
and I'll send you a copy.




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