Entries from September 2005 ↓

So, I finally got around to fixing Evolution’s portability issue, now each of evolution components are split into a complib and a provlib so that all the plugins can link to the privlib rather than the complib. Linking to the complib does not work on Mac ( because complib have a tag Link = no ) which is strictly enforced on the MAc.

Anyway one strange thing was the complib linked to the privlib, so the privlib had to be built first so i added a

libevolution-mail-component.la: libevolution-mail.la
[component library]&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp[priv library]

amazingly that did not work, libevolution-mail.la still got built first, quite weird. So i added a dependency line

libevolution_mail_component_la_DEPENDENCIES = libevolution-mail.la

and that worked, does anybody know why the first one wont/ didn’t work ?

In other news started reading, The Dancing Wu Li Masters, looks promising.

Phenom are playing today at 6, IISC. Come along if you like good music. Dont forget to shout “Mrinal we love you” at regular intervals. The dude performs well when he is loved by the audience, heh

p.s: No, I wont be shouting but you should !

So after bouts of head banging, hair pulling and general maniacal behavior, I finally released Evolution-2.4 for MAC OS X.
Still a few issues, but i will learn with time.

Increasingly convinced that i should move from the current anal binary release format to distributing through Fink. That would make my job so much more easier and also save people a lot of bandwidth.

Decent weekend, Met up with Atul and Gopal on sunday to get some work done on Planet Foss.in. The basics of the planet are up and working, but we need some good css hackers. If you think you can help us then mail me or drop into #foss.in and ping me.

Interesting conversation with Neeti and Jessi in the afternoon on how to get Gnome Bangalore in a better shape. Some really honest opinions which bode well for the future.

Thought it would be fun to list the new joinee’s to Planet Foss.in, and what little i know of them.

• Aivalli: Major linux enthusiast and supposedly a big fan of Kalyan Verma Alluri. Well, who isn’t you ask eh ?
• Jayanth: OOo hacker and poto g33k
• Hariharan: dont know too much abt this dude except for the snazzy *autofs* nick, somebody enlighten me here.

Also if you haven’t signed up to speak yet, then boy you are missing the chance of your life. I think i am going to speak on “Hackers and chicks”, this is successor to Philip’s “how to be a geek” talk. btw the call for participation is here CFP

Enough babble for the day…. So long folks and apparently thanks for all the phish.

I was just about testing my evolution build on 10.3* when i discovered that it does not run! wow, imagine my displeasure to be told that binaries built on 10.4 wont work on 10.3.

The problem seem to be the usage of statvfs in evolution/lib-eutil which was missing in the libc.dylib of 10.3. So, i pondered over it for some time and finally decided that i should remove the symbol reference from evolution and default to using statfs which is wrapped by statvfs anyway. So turned off a few checks in the configure to make e-d-s and evolution use statfs always and now the binaries work with 10.3. I am a happy camper 😀

So, most of the things due for release are complete. I need to get a couple of people to test it and then release it in the next couple of days.

Argh, so after concerts by Sting, Mark Knopler, Deep Purple, Roger Walters and Joe Satriani we have *stark appluase* MLTR *end stark appluase*. What a creepy band following all those great ones. To make matters worse i think a lot of my friends want to go too *argh “someday somewhere i will kill MLTR”.

Spent most of the day debugging why the mono plugin hangs evolution. Creepy stack traces and strace’s (ktrace and kdump) did not help. This mono plugin of evo is a mine feild. Talked with NotZed about the best solution to provide camel as a friendly developer library. Right now the camel is a bit grumpy and bumpy.

Off to meet Shilpa in the evening, good to catch up with her. Went for snacks and read bits of some Bulgarian cook book. Girls read the most darn things. Home for dinner and read bits of

Curious incidents of dog in the night time, not a bad read.

Bed early for once..

So, I finally decided that enough was enough and not to support Exchange in the evo-2.4 MAC build. There are too many issues, mostly of people abusing the linker.

So much of it needs to be thought out and re-done. For instance there are header files like e-account.[h,c] and e-account-list.[h,c] which actually get built into two libraries. When somebody tries to link to both libraries *poof it breaks because of multiple definition of symbols. I was amazed that the Linux linker lets such stuff go, we are indeed blessed with a very forgiving linker.

Spent most of the day playing with Xcode to create an Evolution.app. Not very impressed with how it works. Their help is really *atrocious*. So after building the app, I built evolution one last time to check if everything is ok and behold it has ceased to work. Doesn’t even launch…

It’s 2 in the night and i am tearing shreds of hair of my scalp trying to figure out why its not launching. This peice of shit they call kdump and ktrace makes me miss strace like crazy. Its such a bad beginning to a new day…

So it seems unlikely that i would make a Evolution 2.4 MAC release without fixing the Plugin’s problem i was ranting sometime ago. So spent the whole day just reading to bunch of stuff like JAVA mail API’s and some RFC’s.

Interesting talk with Parag and Harish about how many companies are now seeing India and China as huge potential markets. There have been talks of them being pots of gold for a long long time but the action seems to have started just now.

Really amused by How i failed a turing test. When i come to think of it, i dont think i would have answered any questioned differently either *crikey.