Re: [Evolution] evolution in ubuntu

[Pete Biggs <pete biggs org uk>]

> Some time ago I learned that years ago there was some unfriendly
> interaction (or however you want to call it) between evolution und
> ubuntu people.

No that's not the case. Ubuntu decided to use Thunderbird as their
primary email client, which is an entirely reasonable decision - it's
their distro so they can decide what they want to do with it. I'm not
aware of anyone having a problem with that.

>  Since then, evolution people seem not to have been
> particularly eager to support evolution on the ubuntu platform. Well -
> that's understandable...

"Evolution people"? I presume you mean the developers and us kind folk
here who provide user advice?  But whatever, we/they don't provide
*ANY* support at a distro level for any distro. We will provide advice
and the devs will do bug fixes and enhancements to the current
versions. We will also try and provide advice and help where we can for
older versions, but sometimes the problem requires the distro
maintainers to either upgrade the version or at least provide back-
ported patches to the version they distribute.

There is absolutely nothing that the "Evolution people" can do to
provide versions of Evolution other than those provided by your distro.

It may be that some people will provide a publicly available repository
that will update versions on certain distros, but that is nothing to do
with the Gnome Evolution project.

> As a ubuntu user, I feel not getting the best user experience possible
> with evolution. Still stuck with v 3.22.6, support not as friendly as
> I'm used to, I'm feeling like a 2nd class user...

Lobby your distro maintainers to provide an updated version.  There may
be perfectly valid reasons why they are sticking with that version,
especially if you are using an enterprise or LTS version of a distro -
they specifically stick to known versions of applications to make
corporate support easier, but part of that is that they commit (or
should) to providing bug fixes and support for that version for the
lifetime of the distro version.

Anyway, doesn't Ubuntu 17.10 come with Gnome 3.26 anyway - that should
contain the most recent stable Evolution - if it doesn't you need to
find out why.

> Would the end of the year 2017 not be a good moment to forget about the
> old dispute, shake hands and find out together how evolution, gnome and
> ubuntu people together can create the best user experience? - PIM is
> one of the key applications, and ubuntu is one of the big
> distributions, especially amongst linux newbees. So a really good
> evolution-in-ubuntu-integration is important for the progress of linux
> as a whole, I think.

I think you don't really understand the relationship between distros
and the packages. Things like Gnome, Kde, Mozilla project and the like
are distro agnostic. They are not developed in partnership with anyone.
The code base is released at certain points in time and it is
completely and utterly up to the distributions to do with it as they
see fit. They can use the most recent version, or they can use older
versions, it's up to them how things are integrated into their distro.
And that is how it should be.

P.