| |||||||||||||
Some distribution disagreementsSome distribution disagreementsPosted Apr 13, 2006 3:25 UTC (Thu) by whiprush (subscriber, #23428)Parent article: Some distribution disagreements
I don't post much on LWN, but the mention of Evolution made me smirk.
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/reports/weekly-bug-summary.html
1500 open bug reports.
Novell's marketing exclaims that Evo is a drop in replacement for Outlook with their support for Exchange servers. It's always been a reverse-engineered hack, and it's never really worked, bugs keep getting filed and there's no one fixing the stuff. IMAP performance isn't just horrible, it's plain unusable. Bugs keep getting filed, and not fixed. It's good at POP3, and that's about it.
Nearly every single module on the GNOME desktop has shown performance and memory improvements in 2.14, except for Evolution. It's getting worse. Sure, I would expect the Exchange support to be painful, but the entire thing is just unusable, even for those of us using industry-standard protocols, the entire thing is just a freaking buggy pile.
The entire module is a mess, but unfortunately, Evolution just doesn't seem to be a priority for anyone anymore. I've given up on it.
(Log in to post comments)
Some distribution disagreements Posted Apr 13, 2006 3:33 UTC (Thu) by jbailey (subscriber, #16890) [Link] I have an imap mailbox with 14,000 messages in it which seems to be coping fine.
Evolution isn't the most shining example of a mail client, but it's certainly usable and in use by alot of people every day.
Tks,
Some distribution disagreements Posted Apr 13, 2006 4:12 UTC (Thu) by marduk (subscriber, #3831) [Link] I have to agree. While I am not a HUGE fan of Evolution, I have been using it for years and strictly for IMAP accounts. The only other MUI I've used with IMAP was mutt and I'd still rather use Evolution for IMAP than mutt.
I'm not saying Evolution is perfect, in fact I submitted a bug report today, but the article seemed to indicate that it was all but unusable (especially for IMAP) and I've been using it for years, on multiple IMAP accounts with few issues.
Then again I haven't looked at the bug reports. Perhaps they're doing things I've never dreamed of.
Some distribution disagreements Posted Apr 13, 2006 6:01 UTC (Thu) by jwb (guest, #15467) [Link] I have an IMAP mailbox with 14,000 messages and Evolution shows only about 4,900. And the4,900 are not even the most recent, or the oldest, or alphabetical by sender, or anything that makes sense, they are just selected by some mystery process. Does my anecdotal counterevidence balance your anecdotal evidence? ;)
Seriously though, Evolution is the only MUA I use, because it's the only one with any decent
Some distribution disagreements Posted Apr 13, 2006 12:53 UTC (Thu) by jbailey (subscriber, #16890) [Link] Well, I'm not picky about what language it's in. I've started to come to grips more and more with interpreted languages just because writing testsuites is so much easier.
If I write a testsuite in C, C++, or Java, I have to then compile my code, then compile my testsuite, then run it.
If I write my code and my testsuite in, say, Python (which I'm more familiar with), then my Makefile, distutils or whatever can just start chewing through the testsuites. It's much more likely to encourage me to write them, and so usually wind up with less buggy code in the long run.
I think C# provides this too. So hey, if they write it in C# I'm unlikely to ever hack on it, but maybe they can do test-driven development and shake these bugs out.
Evolution, the Ximian forks, and C# Posted Apr 13, 2006 20:27 UTC (Thu) by massimiliano (subscriber, #3048) [Link] Disclaimer: I am full time in the Mono team, but don't know the Evolution team at all (so that you understand what my perspective is). About the core Ximian Evolution team, AFAIK it's still there, in the sense that (from the inside) I never heard that it disappeared or anything like that! So Evolution is definitely still actively developed. And no, that team is definitely not working on MonoDevelop :-) This I know for sure, because I do know who is working on MonoDevelop, and he's just Lluis Sanchez which does not come from the Evolution team... Finally, about rewriting it in C#, this is nonsense. On the other hand, the idea is that future Evolution extensions can be developed in C#, because it is simply more productive doing so. The Mono runtime has been integrated, and the package which exposes the internal to managed code is called (obviously) evolution#. AFAIK it is used at least by Beagle to index and access tha mail folders, and works very well for this. Of course, just my 2c...
Evolution, the Ximian forks, and C# Posted Apr 13, 2006 20:49 UTC (Thu) by jwb (guest, #15467) [Link] Thanks for the info. I never personally got the impression that Evolution development had slowed. I only got that idea from this article. But regarding MonoDevelop, doesn't Mr. Toshok work on it? And didn't he formerly work on Evo?It's hard to tell what it happening with Evo because the roadmap in the Evo website only goes through the current version. I have noticed a lot of people making side projects off of Evo code like Dates and TinyMail.
Evolution, the Ximian forks, and C# Posted Apr 14, 2006 6:55 UTC (Fri) by massimiliano (subscriber, #3048) [Link] Hey, you are extra careful! Yes, Chris Toshok was in the Evolution team, but no, he does not work on MonoDevelop. He was initially on the debugger, and now I see that most of his svn commits are in System.Web or System.Data.But he is just one guy coming from the Evolution team, and I just forgot about him because one single person changing team is perfectly natural in any company ;-) BTW, who are you in real life? I generally like your comments very much here, but cannot associate "jwb" to a "web presence" outside of this forum...
Some distribution disagreements Posted Apr 13, 2006 16:46 UTC (Thu) by allesfresser (subscriber, #216) [Link] Um, no.
Try using an account that requires changing the mail directory (i.e., you use the account as a normal shell account, and all of the mail should get put into a directory called 'mail'.) Evolution can't handle this--if you change the mail directory it forgets that you have an INBOX. That's not very functional, if you ask me. Somehow KMail, Thunderbird, pine, and even Netscape Messenger 4 can figure this out, not to mention squirrelmail. I've tried Evolution several times over the years, and each time I go back to whatever it was I was using before, because the crashes, freezes and over-complex bugginess just really get to me.
(This most recent trip into Evo-land was with Ubuntu Dapper, Evo 2.6, on both i386 and powerpc)
Some distribution disagreements Posted Apr 15, 2006 14:23 UTC (Sat) by fergal (subscriber, #602) [Link] Have you ever tried moving 1000 messages from one folder to another? Evolution moves them one at a time: copy 1, delete 1, copy 2, delete 2, copy 3, delete 3... (IMAP has no "move" command). It takes ages and there's no excuse for it, IMAP has the ability to operate on multiple messages at a time. Whenever I need to move large number of mails around close evolution, and use python!
Also, evolution has a habit of disappearing off to think for a while, scanning all of my folders just in case any of them got a new message (yes I unchecked "check for new mail in all folders"). It can take 2 or 3 minutes to open a single message when it decides to go off doing something else.
The only reason I stick with it is because it has virtual folders and the ability to run filters on a block of selected messages and that's essential for my mail handling (I get ~500 non-spam emails per day). Last time I checked none of the other mailers had both of these features and better IMAP support.
I'm installing FC5 in a few minutes so maybe it's time to check again.
Some distribution disagreements Posted Apr 13, 2006 4:21 UTC (Thu) by hppnq (guest, #14462) [Link] 1500 open bug reports. Works with Exchange, more than a thousand unsolved bugs: it looks like we're almost ready to crash this particular Microsoft party. :-)
Some distribution disagreements Posted Apr 15, 2006 9:23 UTC (Sat) by mdekkers (guest, #85) [Link] I am responsible for a large estate of mixed windows/linux machines. Our office setup is Windows, our development and production systems are linux. We offer full support for Linux desktops for our dev team, and do what we can to integrate linux systems into the windows environment, and all our windows planning and implementations take linux desktops into account. Recently though, I have had to ask linux users to stop Evolution talking to our Exchange servers, and to please consider no longer using Evolution.
Evolution talking to Exchange places an abnormally high load on our exchange servers, and those using evolution have serious stability issues on their workstations, as well as very high CPU and memory usage. As an alternative, we provide Outlook via Citrix, and this works great. Only issue we are trying to sort out is syncing to phones/PDA's via USB.
Some distribution disagreements Posted Apr 18, 2006 12:38 UTC (Tue) by oak (subscriber, #2786) [Link] Does e.g. Thunderbird work any better performance-wise?
|
|||||||||||||