Back from Istanbul and a few updates

Pretty late blog, but really busy. I landed in Bangalore on July 14 8am to attend a 5 day out-door training starting at 10am. Lucky that the timezone difference isn’t very bad, I happened to manage with my training.

Guadec:

  • Nice parties and thanks to all their sponsors and GNOME.
  • Had nice discussions/talks with Michael, jpr, hpj, Miguel, Aaron, Scott and lot of other hackers
  • Announced about the Evolution licensing change
  • Had a couple of talks at GUADEC
  • Nice chats with Muelli, jrb, thomas, philip,  jorgen
  • Attended lots of talks

Post guadec:

  • Stuck in a training till friday on project management training.
  • Merged on-disk summary with trunk and guess what trunk must be broken for few/most cases. We will shape it well.Blame me/sankar if you see lots of warning on compilation, we explicitly added ‘#warnings’ for lots of stuffs to make sure we fix it instead of growing FIXMEs in the code. We ported most of the providers. Didnt do much for imap4 provider. But will do for it also post 2.23.5 which is on Monday. (Sorry fejj, too busy, so we delayed it). Any other camel provider like evolutin-brutus needs to be ported. I had a live demo at guadec on this and I have some graphs which I collected during my demo. I will attach at the end of the blog.

I had a fixed set of data for Evolution, couple of accounts and 2 vfolders which sort of fetches from all these folders. In total 200,000 mails.

Evolution 2.23.4 (before the merge)

before moving to disk summary

Evolution 2.23.5 (after the merge)

After the merge

Sankar already did a post on how it is done. I got these from massif, I know these arent exact but the comparison sort of shows difference/improvements.Evolution sort of releases unused memory over a period of time when you move away from folders and vfolders queries from db and loads counts. So nothing is loaded except what you see. But there are some issues lying around with the sqlite memory cache free, because of which at times it goes 100% cpu on to allocation of memory during sqlite commit. So Im sort of disabling all memory drop thread for 2.23.5 and would get them to shape during 2.23.6 or so. We have added lots of debug and g_assert(0) at few places to capture some important traces/issue so bear with us in 2.23.5 if it crashes more. File all your bugs to bugzilla and add to the tracker bug. All would be fixed and Evo 2.24 would be slim and rock solid.

Evolution 2.22 released

I sent an announcement mail for Evolution 2.22. A sneak-peak of what we have done in 2.22

 Spam Improvements

  • Bogofilter as default spam filter
  • White list support
  • Junk detection based on server side spam headers (Faster as messages won’t be download)
  •  Junk/NotJunk flags stored on the IMAP Server (Second instance of Evolution detects spam automatically from stored  headers)

UI Improvements

  • New look Tango icons
  • Non intrusive error reporting and logging framework
  • Message tagging (Custom labels)

New Backends

  • Google calendar support

Memory Improvements

  • Major design change in memory handling in libical. EDS should take/have very less memory.
  • Loads of valgrind/memory leak fixes

GtkHTML Improvements

  • Frame/IFrame Anchor support
  • Saving embedded html image

General Improvements

  • Improved mime parsing. (Evolution parses much more than thunderbird)
  • Crash detection (Helps to disable preview pane, if the previous crash was due to last rendered email)
  • Experimental External Editor plugin
  • Plugin configuration support
  • Clean up of new mail notification configuration to plugin configuration
  • Password improvements (Now passwords are forgotten only for invalid credentials and not for all errors)

Bug fixes

  • Nearly 50 crash fixes
  • Some very important bug fixes
    • VFolder/trash/junk crashes
    • Itip-viewer crashes
    • Calendar/libical crashes
    • Summary/Folder mismatch
    • Exchange filtering crashes
    • Exchange connection lost fixes
    • GtkHTML rendering crash fixes

and nearly 450 bug fixes

Thanks a lot to every one who contributed patches/bug/debug informations/others for Evolution 2.22. Please have a look at the wiki for more information on what is coming up for Evolution 2.24.