Re: [Evolution] Wot? No spam filters? was Re: evolution-list Digest, Vol 116, Issue 8

[Paul Smith <paul mad-scientist net>]

On Sat, 2015-03-07 at 16:23 +0000, Pete Biggs wrote:
> juggle ekit com wrote:
> > I am at a loss to understand why Evolution - which has worked pretty
> > much perfectly ever since I moved over to Ubuntu nearly a decade ago -
> > should suddenly start falling over.  Has the age-old engineering maxim
> > "if it works, don't mess with it" has been disregarded?

I went to the trouble of providing links showing exactly what happened
and why with spam filtering in Ubuntu in my previous email.  Were those
not clear?

I not sure why the Evo team decided to require the spam filtering
software be present at both build and install time, but that, combined
with rigid policy requirements in Ubuntu, caused the Ubuntu team to
disable support for external spam filtering.

Yes, in an ideal world Ubuntu would not have done that.  They would have
either promoted the spam filtering software to be part of the "main"
distribution (but this would require someone stepping up to support
them), or worked with the Evo team to fix the problem, as Milan did last
month.  However, they took the easy way out and made the 5 second local
change of disabling spam filtering.  That's unfortunate but
understandable: the distributions have a lot of software to wrangle and
they only have so much time in the day.

> Again, this is to do with the decisions made my Ubuntu.  The same
> version of Evolution is absolutely stable in other distros - there's
> certainly no systematic problem with Evolution.  I get the impression
> though that some one or some group of people have fallen out of love
> with Evo in the Ubuntu camp - I don't particularly think there is a
> conspiracy against it, but I think it's not the most important thing
> on their mind.

One of the features of Ubuntu has always been that rather than
installing all the possible tools in each class, they choose _one_ tool
in each class to install as the default.  Those are the tools that they
work hard to make sure are stable and well-integrated.  Many, many other
tools are available of course, but they must be installed explicitly and
these are not necessarily "tier 1" tools in terms of attention and
support.

For whatever reason, a number of years ago Ubuntu decided to switch to
Thunderbird as their default email tool, rather than Evo.  While the
people in Ubuntu supporting Evo care about it and want it to work well,
they don't have as much time (or leverage) to put into it as they
otherwise would.