Evolution Account Management - Report 4

[Tobias Mueller <Muelli Auftrags-Killer org>]

Hey Folks :)

I fought a lot with autofool, jhbuild and evolution last week. Actually 
I am able to build everything with few nasty hacks. First of all, a 
major problem was a new glib which had a new function while my systems 
glib doesn't. It would be no problem if the build process doesn't pick 
that system's library, but it does. I found out, that NetworkManager 
support is the issue, because jhbuild didn't build it, thus the systems 
has been taken with all it's libraries, including glib.
I was not able to build NetworkManager with jhbuild myself due to a 
reason I forgot. As we are on jhbuild, I filed some bugs and wrote some 
patches for it.

So I patched the NetworkManager support out of the configure script but 
couldn't even configure then, because it needed shared-mime-info to be 
in 0.23 and it found it to be in version 0.19. But I really don't 
understand that, because on my system as well as in my jhbuild sandbox, 
0.23 is installed. So patched that dependency out as well. That took a 
whole lot of time... But to be faster, I've ordered a new machine with 
more power.

But after successfully building everything, I can't run it, because dbus 
or ORBit or GConf is broken (or misconfigured). When I try to run any 
application like bonobo-browser or anjuta, I get the following error:

GConf Error: Failed to contact configuration server; some possible 
causes are that you need to enable TCP/IP networking for ORBit, or you 
have stale NFS locks due to a system crash. See 
http://www.gnome.org/projects/gconf/ for information. (Details -  1: 
Could not send message to gconf daemon: The name org.gnome.GConf was not 
provided by any .service files)

I tried things like setting BONOBO_ACTIVATION_PATH or editing 
bonobo-activation-config.xml, though both look actually good. So I have 
built things now, but I can't run them...

The strangest thing, however, is that I can't run any mono app anymore. 
Some poeple consider this a feature, but I am rather irritated by that. 
If I try to run Tomboy or monodevelop, I get the very same error as 
above. A "strace -eopen | grep /opt/gnome2" reveals, that it somehow 
accesses data in /opt/gnome2/ although it shouldn't!. I've grepped 
through /etc/ and through my home directory and didn't find anything 
special. If I move /opt/gnome2 somewhere else, everything works as expected.

So if anybody has a clue, why that gconf thing doesn't work, I'd be 
happy to hear that. Otherwise I'll wait for my new machine to set up a 
new build environment with not so much probably tainted data.

Besides fighting with autocrap and friends, I've tried Vala. And what 
can I say? It doesn't hurt :) At least if you stay in Vala mode, the 
generated C code made my eyes bleed sometime ;-) It's quite nice have 
most of the boring GObject stuff done automatically. Well, that Vala 
exercise took some time as well, I hope my mentor won't be mad at me, 
but I really don't think so :o)

I still plan to migrate account management code off Evolution and e-d-s 
to a single library to identify the parts of the evo-code which deal 
with it. To achieve that, I need to know how to actually create a 
library with autopoop. I think I'll try to copy that from other libs and 
hope that it's not too complicated. I'll then have to rewrite the 
includes in the dependent files. I dunno whether I can do that within 
the next week, but I have a plan and it feels pretty straight forward, 
but let's see what time brings.

Well, that's it for today. I'm fed up with coding, I'm having a beer now :P
Cheers,
  Tobi