Would you like to see Geary 0.4 available on Ubuntu 12.04 / elementary Luna?

geary-yorbaWe’ve received a lot of complaints from users that Geary 0.4 isn’t available for Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise Pangolin) and elementary Luna.  It wasn’t an arbitrary decision on our part.  As we developed Geary 0.4, we learned that more and more components that Geary relied on were changing or simply unavailable in 12.04/Luna.  There’s a tangible engineering cost to maintaining backward compatibility.  At some point this summer we realized it was too much work to maintain support for 12.04/Luna as well as newer versions of Ubuntu, Fedora, and all the other distros out there.

But Ubuntu 12.04 and elementary Luna (which is based off of 12.04) has a steady fan base who would really like to run Geary 0.4.  What to do?

We have limited resources, but we don’t want to leave users out in the cold.  We believe this is a problem both Yorba and the community can solve.  So we’ve created a bounty for the problem — if someone out there (or a group of people) solves this problem for us (and therefore everyone else!), they’re rewarded with cold, hard cash.  It’s that simple.

If you’re interested, read on:

There’s two pages you should read: the issue ticket at Yorba’s project server (which details the problem and the stipulations for collecting the bounty) as well as the bounty page at Bountysource.com (where the promised funds are listed).

If you want to see Geary 0.4 work on 12.04/Luna, you can help.  Go to the bounty page at Bountysource.com and pledge what you can.  The more the community offers, the more motivation developers have to take on this challenge.  It’s not easy what we’re asking for — whomever takes this on deserves a reward for their time, energy, and expertise.  What’s more, if no one solves this problem, you get your money back (minus Bountysource.com’s fee).

If you have the right stuff to backport Geary 0.4 to 12.04/Luna, dive right in.  Make sure you read the issue ticket first for all the stipulations.  This isn’t a simple matter of getting Geary to compile on 12.04.  You have to make sure anyone running 12.04 can install it via their package manager.  Yorba’s developers are willing to guide you along, offer advice, point out resources or commits that you might be interested in.  But you need to make it happen.

Just to show that we’re serious about this, Yorba has already pledged $500 toward this bounty.  We’re hoping the community will toss in more money to further sweeten the pot.  If everyone who has asked us to backport Geary 0.4 to 12.04/Luna offered $10, $25, or $50 toward the job, there would be no problem finding someone to do the work.

(Note: Yorba employees are prohibited from collecting any bounty money for Yorba-related projects.)

7 thoughts on “Would you like to see Geary 0.4 available on Ubuntu 12.04 / elementary Luna?”

  1. Can the bitcoins I donated go towards this project? I use elementary exclusively now and would like to use Geary more often than I do.

      1. I had donated BTC to Yorba a month or two ago. Is there any way to allocate the funds to help run Geary in Luna? Geary is pure awesome. Running the latest versions in Elementary OS seems a no brainer.

  2. It sounds surprising to me, that so much extra effort is needed to support an additionaly distribution. Would static linking not be sufficient?

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