Re: [Evolution] Configuration problem -- perhaps some instructions would help

[Pete Biggs <pete biggs org uk>]

On Mon, 2015-07-06 at 08:53 -0400, John Lauterbach wrote:
> Perhaps I am oversimplifying things, but it appears that the 
> developers of Evolution are working far ahead of those who compile 
> the program for use with various Linux distributions.

No, not at all.  You just happen to use a distro that doesn't care that
Evolution is a long way behind in their repositories.  There are plenty
of distros that keep up to date.  Fedora 22 is currently on 3.16.3.

There are ultra stable distros (what Ubuntu calls "LTS" versions) that,
by design, keeps the same version of an application throughout their
long lifetime.  In those cases the distro should commit to back porting
patches, especially security ones, but they won't upgrade the app
version and hence there won't be any feature enhancements.  RHEL (and
hence CentOS, SL, etc.) are in this class - RHEL7 has Evolution 3.8.5.

You also have to remember that Evolution is a Gnome application - the
version of Evolution usually matches the version of Gnome in a distro.
If your distro has a pathological dislike of Gnome (or just Gnome 3)
then you are going to have a hard time getting an up to date version of
Evolution.

>   It also appears that if it were not for the efforts of Fabian 
> Tassin, I would be stuck using a very outdated version of Evolution. 
>  Right now, I am using 3.16.0 (Ubuntu 15.04) when I should be (if I 
> have interpreted the postings on this list correctly) using 3.16.3. 
>  I would be more than happy to try configuring (compiling?), if I had 
> some step-by-step instructions on how to do it.
If you have 3.16.x already installed, then it must already have many of
the correct libraries.  You will need the devel (or whatever your
distro calls them) versions as well to get the header files.  Then just
download the evolution and evolution-data-server tar balls, unpack them
and run configure. Note all the failed dependencies, sort those out,
rinse, repeat.

P.