Re: The future of gnome-pim - and Balsa, too?

[Adam Tauno Williams <awilliam whitemice org>]

>>>With Evolution 1.0 soon to be realeased, I'm a bit concerned about the
>>>future of other GNOME applications that implement some of its
>>>functionality, mainly the Calender and Address Book, but to a certain
>>>extent Balsa, too.
>>First,  I am a very happy Evolution user.  Evolution FINALLY plugs a
>>HUGE hole in the Linux application suite,  the calendering etc...
>>actually can interact with other e-mail platforms (cough, Outlook,
>>cough).
>Balsa start nearly in one second.
>Evolution need a few minutes (all tested flavour).

Not quite a few minutes,  but certainly longer than Balsa.  But this is
Linux,  I only start it once a day.

>Evoltion doesn't like procmail.

Neither do most users,  except old UNIX mavens.  I am an old UNIX maven,
and agree that procmail is great,  but it doesn't matter one bit,
***users*** are never going to use it.  Never,  never, never.  It isn't
even worth mentioning to them.

>Evolution can't handle big mailbox (subscribe to the linux kernel ml for a
>few weeks and see).

?  My largest mailbox has almost 2k messages, seems fine.

>Evolution is nice for ex-window users but should not kill others MUA, ...

Haven't used Windows for more than a few minutes at a time since Wfwg
3.11.  Evolution puts everything together,  lets one focus on the
problems that need solving not the fact that my mailbox is in mbox
format, and my Calendar is in iCal, so I need to write a script to
do....  If that is steeling a page from the Window's play book (or
Apples :) then so be it.

I didn't sat it would "kill" other MUAs, and I don't think it will and
hope it doesn't (although IMHO there are some that should die).  It just
raises the bar,  and this being Open Source,  others will follow (you
can always steal chunks of Evolutions code :).