Re: [Evolution] evolution in ubuntu

[Ralf Mardorf <silver bullet zoho com>]

Hi,

as you can see at https://packages.ubuntu.com/bionic/evolution is from
the "universe" repository.
The same applies to Gnome, https://packages.ubuntu.com/bionic/gnome , an
important hard dependency of
libevolution https://packages.ubuntu.com/bionic/libevolution is
libgnome-desktop-3-12
https://packages.ubuntu.com/bionic/libgnome-desktop-3-12 .

The policy to split software from upstream into tons of packages doesn't
help either to grant stability.

A short explanation of the "main" and the "universe" repository:

"Main

The main component contains applications that are free software, can be
freely redistributed and are fully supported by the Ubuntu team." -
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Repositories#Main

"Universe

The universe component is a snapshot of the free, open-source, and Linux
world. It houses almost every piece of open-source software, all built
from a range of public sources. Canonical does not provide a guarantee
of regular security updates for software in the universe component, but
will provide these where they are made available by the community. Users
should understand the risk inherent in using these packages." -
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Repositories#Universe

Release date of Bionic Beaver Ubuntu 18.04 LTS is in April 2018, see
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Releases . Did you already ask why the new
default DE is still from "universe"? The appropriate mailing list to do
this is https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
(don't confuse it with
https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel ).

This should explain the issue with the Ubuntu policy and their unstable
Evolution packages from the official Ubuntu repository.

A lot of software provided by "universe" is stable, so why isn't
Evolution stable, too? The answer is very simple, it's related to the
dependency chain of the software. The longer the dependency chain, the
harder it's to maintain a package.

The Evolution coders can't change Ubuntu's policy, they just provide the
source code with all the information needed to build Evolution from
source.

Regards,
Ralf