December 13, 2007 – 11:08 am
Andre posted a mail on the hackers list about the state of Evolution docs. The doc team here at Novell uses FrameMaker to manage documentation. So the master copy that we use is frame files which can only be exported to XML and no way to import/sync from xml. So any commits that happen for the XML file on the svn needs to be manually synced. At times, some patches are XML fixes which are auto-generated by FrameMaker. In which cases, the commit from Frame files to svn would overwrite them. This is a big issue. One solution that came our is hand editing XML files for documentation. Definitely hand editing the files isn’t going to be easy (it is 8K lines file with almost 1K modification every release). It can be more prone to errors than now. I really want to know how other projects over come this?. Are there any other tools or process other projects use? Or just hand edit XML files? Any better suggestions to me? I would be happy to hear any suggestions/processes that already other projects use.
December 4, 2007 – 6:35 pm
I just released Evolution 2.21.3 (Yes we synced Evolution with GNOME version) and send a update to the evolution hackers list. Some highlights of that. Till now, we have committed
- Google Calendar support (Read/Write – You can create meetings)
- External Editor support for composer – You can use Vim or Emacs for composing
- Lots of bug fixes
I hope that I should be able to get
- Exchange Smart card support
- Non-intrusive error reporting
- Matt’s new look composer to trunk
- UAM (Unified account management) – This is the base work required to do split.
We are spending lot of effort on MAPI based Exchange connector developed in a branch (evolution and evolution-data-server). I’m not sure, if we can make it to 2.22 but surely, it can be added as a plugin later on. This connector should be able to connect to Exchange 5.5, 2000/2003/2007 servers. It is based on OpenChange’s libmapi.
I hope that things would be much clearer after a few weeks.
December 1, 2007 – 12:48 pm
For the past 2 months, either me or my wife or my son was sick and down with cold and flu. My son had recurring 3-4 days of flu for almost three times over the last month and I almost took 2 week vacation to get him better. I was back from my vacation during last week. Just a few days after I returned from my vacation, his flu started again (last friday, Nov 23). Till now he was down with fever and yesterday I got him hospitalized him at Apollo. All the tests related to flu failed and the doctor concluded that it is FUO (Fever of Unidentified Origin) and then the doctor requested for an abdominal CT Scan and that too turned to be all fine and finally we did a chest x-ray to see that it is some sort of Pneumonia. I was so worried he had non-stop fever of 102+ F for almost 8 days and no signs of coming down. Just after the test, the doctor started an anti-biotic and I’m hoping that his fever should come down in a few days. Doctor advised us to keep him at hospital for atleast 5 days. I don’t feel like doing anything 
September 21, 2007 – 4:21 pm
I released Evolution 2.12 with GNOME 2.20. This is my first release as the maintainer for Evolution. Some interesting things we did for Evolution 2.12 follows
Spam Improvements
- New bogofilter spam plugin
- Spam plugins (bogofilter/spamassasin) can now learn ham
- Spams don’t initiate new mail notifications
- and…
UI Improvements
- Basic contact merging support.
- Improved search support for Calendar and Tasks
- Better printing support for mailer
- Magic space bar support – Read all the unread mails in all folders with just space bar key
- Message selection improvements
- More options for offline support
- New –disable-preview command line option to avoid repeated crash on last selected email
- Option for Outlook style signature on top – more details here
- Option for Outlook style reply header
- Spinner in the status bar
- Support for multimedia keys
- Support for showing contact photos in preview pane
- Thread sorting based on the date of the latest message
Performance Improvements
- Addressbook improvements from DBus port branch
- EContact/VCard folding optimizations
- Huge Exchange folder loading optimizations
New Plugins
- Bogofilter spam plugin
- Attachment reminder plugin
- TNEF attachment plugins (Experimental)
- Revamped backup/restore plugin
Lots of Exchange/GroupWise performance/stability fixes went in 2.12 release. We had a special focus on stability in 2.12 cycle and Evolution has nearly 100 crashers fixed and in total 450 bugs were fixed during the 2.12 cycle. Now we are preparing a planning page for the next cycle here. Feel free to add your thoughts to the planning page.
Thanks a lot for the contributors and we are looking forward for the next release.
August 28, 2007 – 6:18 am
Evolution’s goals (camel) are definitely different from Tinymail’s goal (camel-lite). You definitely can’t substitute each other in all places. Users wont be happy to use a email client that doesn’t even support message threading on a desktop. Philip posted an overview camel-lite onto the evolution-hackers list some time back. Camel-lite has a lot of things that can be merged with upstream camel like pop summary, some IMAP improvements (non-hacky stuffs). I’m sure that the discussion is ON between Varadhan and Philip to get the pop summary into trunk for early 2.14 cycle and more merging of useful things down the time. But I won’t / don’t think Evolution would move away from camel to camel-lite any time.
Update: I just saw that Sankar (who maintains EPlugins) has posted a nice blog about Evolution/Camel/Camel-lite. Though I don’t agree to all the points, some interesting differences and goals.
It is really nice to be at GUADEC and see the ever busy GNOME hackers
I had my talk first in the morning. Guenther saved me from my Magic Spacebar demo failure. (Caret mode was ON) It went pretty good otherwise. Unfortunately there was no recording as I have heard before.
I had a nice chat with the audience after the talk. Nice to see the Evolution hackers from China.
Wondering what is this all about? Varadhan has posted an excellent blog about his optimization work for the Exchange Connector. Read his post for the complete information.
You don’t see the graph for/with the patch. Yeah it is so difficult to paint microseconds in the graph 
Milan Crha and Øystein Gisnås are doing an awesome patch for Evolution/EDS which improves add / get contact apis from 37 seconds to 0.15 second. This is gonna rock performance of contacts with images. Great work guys!
Evolution got 3 Google summer of code projects.
Google Calendar backend for EDS/Evolution
by Ebby Wiselyn, mentored by Harish Krishnaswamy
Evolution Message Threading Improvements
by Tobias Mueller, mentored by Sven Herzberg
Evolution/Seahorse Integration
by Pınar Yanardağ, mentored by Raphael Slinckx
A BIG thanks to all the mentors and students and all the very best to Ebby, Tobias Mueller and Pınar Yanardağ.
