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

[Jeffrey Stedfast <fejj ximian com>]

On 13 Aug 2001 13:49:48 +0200, Toralf Lund wrote:
> On 2001.08.13 10:58 christophe barbé wrote:
> > 
> > Le jeu, 09 aoû 2001 19:01:28, Adam Tauno Williams a écrit :
> > > >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).
> ... and starts zillons of processes ...
> > 
> > Evoltion doesn't like procmail.
> > 
> > Evolution can't handle big mailbox (subscribe to the linux kernel ml for
> > a
> > few weeks and see).
> Unfortunately, Balsa also has problems with these. At least, opening them
> takes forever for some of my "mailing list" boxes, which also (combined
> with another bug, really) means that I can't really use the "Check" is
> quite unusable to me. ;-( I'm using IMAP, though...
> 
> > 
> > Evolution is nice for ex-window users but should not kill others MUA, ...
> I agree. My main objection to Evolution is as I indicated earlier that it
> tries to handle several different tasks that I don't think belong in the
> same application - and its developers seem unable to give any good
> arguments against this. 

I don't recall you ever asking?

The answer is simple: 

addressbook: I think we can all see why this is needed, yes?

calendar: this isn't generally needed by a single-user at home, but for
an office this feature is very useful. It allows people to schedule
meetings with each other and remind them of important dates/times/etc
via email - the most common form of communication over a network.

And there we have it...

> I know the answer to the question about why exactly
> these tasks were integrated, of course, it is simply "because Microsoft did
> it", but I don't think that's a good answer. This touches on another
> concern I have about GNOME: I think that too much time is spent on
> emulating MS Windows behaviour. Why? Aren't we all using Linux/Unix because
> Windows is crap???

Would you prefer we emulate what? CDE? Yea, I can just picture Joe
Computer User using CDE as their desktop. Riiiight.

GNOME is about bringing easy-to-use software to the masses ,it's not
about emulating Windows (except where the Windows UI is good) or making
a Hacker-Desktop.

If that's not what you want, then you have plenty of other choices.

> 
> 
> Having said that, I really appreciate the fact that the different types of
> functionality in Evolution are split into different reusable components.
> Maybe some of the good bits ought to be integrated into Balsa?

Sure, they could easily be. But if you "integrate" them into Balsa, then
what have you gained over using Evolution? Because then you will
complain about Balsa being too "integrated". You seem to say you don't
want something and then turn around 180 degrees and say you *do* want
it.

If what you want is something small, minimal, and fast, then use a small
mail client, but if what you want is a full-featured cluent, then use
Evolution. Taking stuff from Evolution and dumping them on top of Balsa
isn't going to be better than just using Evolution. In fact, it'll
probably be worse because Balsa wasn't designed with the Evolution
components in mind.

Jeff