> I've always been a little confused that Thunderbird developers can't just copy-and-paste the relevant code. They're both open source, right?
You have a massive misunderstanding of how software is typically structured or developed if you think that's possible for anything but the absolute very simplest of code.
The code for a feature like this is going to be dependent on heaps of internal APIs and dependencies which are going to be very different between each project.
Evolution is written in C with glib. Thunderbird is written in a mix of C++ and JavaScript, using a custom object system and STL. There is probably not even a single line of non-trivial code between the two that can be shared without having to rewrite it.
Posted Jun 7, 2012 12:29 UTC (Thu) by bosyber (subscriber, #84963)
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I think that at most the Thunderbird developers can look at the evolution code to see where they worked around gotcha's and issues in different LDAP implementations. That leaves a lot of sweat of the brow work to get LDAP in a working state, and then test it. Not out of the question they haven't had time and priority to do that work so far.