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

[Toralf Lund <toralf kscanners com>]

On 2001.08.13 18:18 Jeffrey Stedfast wrote:
> 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?
I know I've discussed this on GNOME news.
> 
> The answer is simple: 
> 
> addressbook: I think we can all see why this is needed, yes?
Of course. I still think it should be a separate application that may be
started independently of the e-mail client, though. I want to access my
address book without sending e-mail often enough.
> 
> 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.
No, I don't buy this argument. In think you want an e-mail client _and_ a
calendar application, along with a good exchange mechanism for data
(perhaps
simply a suitable format), rather than an e-mail-and-calendar application
with internal data exchange.

On _our_ network, the most common type of e-mail data is:
	1. Raster images and vectorised versions of these in some form.
	2. Bits of code, patches, design suggestions etc.
Does this mean that we should have an e-mail client that is also an image
editor, vectorising tool, compiler, CASE application etc.?

The point is simply that providing the necessary "glue" to allow the
different tools to work smoothly together is the desktop's job, not the
application's. - What's that you are saying? You found that the desktop
didn't do this job quite well enough? Well, you do have its source code,
don't you?

On a slightly different note, one of the reasons for exchanging "calendar"
information via e-mail may be the lack of a good network-shared calendar
environment. If you had developed a complete solution here (which is, of
course, a considerable task), you may just have found that the need for
e-mail exchange (of this kind of data) had gone away.

>
> 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.
Like someone else said: I don't think we should emulate any particular
desktop, we
should combine the best features of different environments, and try to add
some real invention to it.

Having said that, I always liked the IMD, a.k.a. 4D desktop, on the SGI.
And I have seen Joe Computer User use that, he happens to be one of our
customers...
> 
> 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.
Well, I'm glad you are saying that, because that's the way I think it ought
to be.

What I was saying, really, was that Outlook is one of the areas where the
Windows UI is _not_ very good, but that's just my opinion, of course. (But
I don't think I'm without support, my sceptisism is mainly based on the
fact that the design breaks with some fundamental principles set out in
fields like Structured Design and, since someone else mentioned this, HCI.)

> 
> 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.
No. I was talking about _e_mail_ functionality, nothing else. If for
instance Evolution has a message composer that's better than the Balsa one
(this is merely an example, I haven't really made an option on this),
and it's available as a component, then integrating this would improve
Balsa. And if you find that the rest of Balsa's environment is more usable
than the
one of Evolution, you would end up with an improvement over both original
environments.

But perhaps there's only one component for _everything_ e-mail related?
> 
> 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.
Arguably, it shoudn't matter where the components come from if it was
designed properly.

Finally: I may sound too negative about Evolution now. I actually like most
of it. You see, that's exactly why it annoys me sometimes. I can easily
live with (and forget about) software that is of no use to me, but find it
a lot harder to live with applications that do _nearly_ what I want.

- T