Re: [Evolution] Evolution 3.1.x

[Jonathan Ryshpan <jonrysh pacbell net>]

Thanks very much for this long informative reply.  As you see I am extremely unhappy with evolution, and would dump it, except that I am even more unhappy with the competition.  A sad situation!  Comments follow.

On Thu, 2011-07-28 at 18:57 +0200, Andre Klapper wrote: 
> On Thu, 2011-07-28 at 09:45 -0700, Jonathan Ryshpan wrote:
> > As you may remember, I've been running the Evolution mail system under
> > Fedora-15/KDE for about a month now, and it has some very serious
> > problems, which I can summarize as: 
> >      1. It ignores font control from the KDE Settings->Applications
> >         Appearance window, both KDE font control and GTK+ font
> >         control, also its own internal font control window.
>
> I can't speak for the KDE part, but for the GNOME part this should be
> fixed by https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=655002 . There is no
> stable release including the fix yet, though.
I surmise from this that evolution's fonts are controlled by gconf-editor, which manages a tree of control variables for evolution.  The only relevant section I can find is /apps/evolution/mail/display/fonts, which says evolution should use a 14 point custom font.  This is what I've set in
>     Evolution->Preferences->Message Display
but not what evolution does.  Should use gsettings instead? 
> >      1. It has trouble sending messages to an SMTP server, sometimes
> >         taking a l-o-n-g time, sometimes timing out. This can be
> >         temporarily cured by restarting it 
>
> I wonder if CAMEL_DEBUG=all could provide some debug output. See
> http://projects.gnome.org/evolution/bugs.shtml
Is there any standard way to show just the communication between evolution and the smtp server?  Or should I dump out everything using CAMEL_DEBUG=all and build a filter? 
> >      1. It crashes when a filter attempts to refile an outgoing
> >         message. 
>
> A crash report with a good stacktrace in bugzilla.gnome.org is welcome.
> See http://live.gnome.org/GettingTraces for a how-to. The Details link
> in the last sentence explains how to use gdb for this. Make sure to have
> sufficient debug packages installed (but gdb will tell you about this
> anyway).
I have already done this, in https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=653957 .  The problem is reported to have been fixed in 3.0.3, which is not available in the updates repo, nor on koji. 
> > I'd like to try out evolution 3.1.x, which seems to be stuck somewhere
> > in the pipeline, so I downloaded the latest evolution-3.1.4-1.fc16,
> > from koji.  Unfortunately it won't run, nor will the source build, due
> > to incompatibilities between the versions on koji, which are for fc16
> > and my current fc15 system.
>
> JHBuild might be an option: http://live.gnome.org/Jhbuild . Note that
> https://live.gnome.org/JhbuildDependencies/Fedora is slightly outdated
> and does not list Fedora 15 (yet) so you'll run into some issues when
> using jhbuild that will require installing additional packages.
Looks interesting, but appears to have a major learning curve, particularly if it doesn't support fc15. 
> > Questions: 
> >       * Do you expect to have an evolution-3.1.x available on updates
> >         (or wherever) in the near future 
>
> 3.1.x is unstable, so I do hope that no serious distro ships it in their
> updates for a stable distro.
> To provide a Fedora-specific answer: Either use Fedora 16 or use
> Rawhide. Both are unstable and might eat your computer.
Thanks for the tip.  I had the impression that Suse had released it, but only because I misunderstood their web site. 
> >       * if not, is there any simple way to get the versions on koji to
> >         install or build on my system?
>
> That's really a question for a Fedora mailing list, as upstream GNOME
> has nothing to do with distributions' infrastructure and packaging.
Quite right.