Re: [Evolution] Automatic Update for Evolution

[Paul Smith <paul mad-scientist net>]

On Tue, 2009-09-29 at 08:47 -0500, Barbara Tobias wrote:
> Is there a way to have the update manager automatically download the
> latest stable release of Evolution when it is doing other updates?  I am
> using Evolution 2.26.1 under Ubuntu Linux 9.04.  I'm also relatively new
> to Linux and not very technically savvy.

Hi Barbara.  Welcome to GNU/Linux!

It can be confusing to understand the ecosystem of free software.  The Evolution program is part of the Gnome project, which implements a complete desktop environment.  The Gnome environment is developed by free software developers all over the world and it maintains a six month release cycle, with releases typically coming on September and March.

The "releases" made by the Gnome development team are the raw source code needed to build the Gnome desktop; that's a LOT of code and it takes a LONG time (and a bit of expertise--although not as much as you'd think) to compile that code into something you can run on your system and use.  So, as a user, the Gnome releases aren't immediately useful to you.

There are lots of other software projects, with all different release cycles and build requirements.  It can be quite confusing.


The GNU/Linux distributions, such as Ubuntu, Debian, Red Hat, SuSE, and various others, do the hard work of taking all those different software projects and building them into one unified whole, that you can actually use.  Each of these has their own release schedule and their own design goals.  These are what most people use on their desktops and servers (etc.)


So, the short answer is that for questions about when certain packages will be available, or how, for a given distribution (like Ubuntu) you need to ask the folks who manage the Ubuntu release, on their forums or mailing lists or whatever.  Even though the Evolution team writes the software, they don't have any input into or control over when or how the software will be available on a given GNU/Linux distribution.


However, since many of us do use Ubuntu, in this case we can give you the answer here, anyway :-).  Ubuntu has a six-month release schedule that is intentionally based on the Gnome release schedule.  Ubuntu schedules its releases for a few weeks after the Gnome release; Ubuntu releases in October and April.  So, the newest version of Gnome (and hence the just-released version of Evolution) will be available in the Ubuntu 9.10 release, which will be out next month, on October 29.

Most distributions, including Ubuntu, do not build newer releases of Gnome for older versions of the distribution.  So, you should not expect to see the just-released Evolution version become available for your current version of Ubuntu (9.04).

The good news is that upgrading Ubuntu (and most other GNU/Linux distributions) is nowhere near as painful and disruptive as upgrading versions of MS Windows, for example.


Hope this information proves helpful!