Re: [Evolution] Handling Aliases, Silent Mode, & "Combo Tasks"

[Adam Tauno Williams <awilliam whitemice org>]

On Fri, 2010-12-10 at 08:42 +0100, Onyeibo Oku wrote:
> Greetings
> I'm not sure if this should fall into the hacking section or general
> section ... so pardon me if this is the wrong audience.  I have bumped
> into some areas in Evolution that, I think, might either be buggy or
> could use some improvement.  It is possible that I'm doing something
> wrong.  I'd appreciate some corrections, and links in that case. Here
> they are:
> 1. Once an account is set up it becomes difficult to implement an
> "alias sending".  Evolution doesn't allow its user change the sender's
> field when composing ... except for accounts created locally.  For
> people involved in open-source projects like Evolution this makes it
> hard to use evolution to send list related mails.  Why? Some users
> have email aliases tied to their email accounts ... and use the
> aliases for such projects.  Is there no way one could override the
> sender's field so users can enter their email aliases instead?

Create send-only accounts - then you can choose this "alias" when you
send (send is a drop-down).

<aside>if you are someone who creates a separate e-mail address for
every list - stop doing that, it is dumb, annoying, and pointless;  I
have no sympathy for people with crazy practices.</aside>

> 2. It would be nice if evolution can start silently ... docked in the
> panel and runs on the background.  This will ensure that the user gets
> notified when mails arrive.  This also frees the task bar.  This
> functionality can be archived in conjunction with another application
> called Alltray, but alltray has side effects. It introduces shaky
> graphic performance (Compiz transitions are affected)

Doesn't run-minimized do this?

> 3. This is more of a feature request: Wouldn't it be nice if Evolution
> can handle what I call "Layered Tasks" ... or "Stratified Tasks" ...
> or maybe, "Combo Tasks".  I've been thinking about this ever since I
> started using Evolution.  I see Combo Tasks (or whatever) as a Task
> that has other tasks inside it -- like a project with small
> objectives.   I hope I'm not sounding crazy

No, that isn't crazy, it would be awesome.  But I don't expect it to
happen.  In Evolution tasks are VTODOs (basically) and the VTODO is the
lamest of the [IMO, deeply flawed] iCalendar standard(s) - it doesn't
support anything like task dependency or inheritance.  [Although you
could support this with X- attributes it would be a fair amount of code
around a non-standard scheme so I'd be surprised if the Evo hackers took
it up].  Note that task delegation is not even possible in Evolution
[major drawback!].

There are GNOME applications for project management[ Planner
<http://live.gnome.org/Planner/>], and last I knew the Evo plugin for
planner [to make planner tasks available in Evo] was working.  But evo
remains ignorant of the 'enhanced' task functionality. Another downside
of that scheme is that there is no server-side integration [for Planner]
which means none of this can be easily shared.