Some distribution disagreements [LWN.net]

Back when Red Hat Linux was a product delivered by Red Hat Inc. in its final form, the user community had little visibility into the decisions that affected the distribution. One of the early promises that came with the Fedora Project was that the important discussions would happen in a public forum. Things have not always happened that way, and a number of things still seem to happen by anonymous decree. It is true, however, that the public discussion has grown more vibrant as the wider Fedora community insists on having its say.

One recurring discussion has to do with one of those decisions by decree: Fedora Core 5 lacks the "install everything" option which has characterized Red Hat releases for many years. The reasons behind this change make some sense: it is increasingly hard to support as the distribution grows, and as the distribution is split between "core" and "extras." Some packages conflict with others, making a true "everything" install impossible in any case. Installing everything is an invitation to unnecessary security problems. And the Anaconda installer has been reworked around a yum-based backend which is not so well equipped to do "everything" installs in any case. Administrators who do a lot of "everything" installs can use kickstart to obtain something close to the old behavior.

So removing this option was not an unreasonable thing to do. But the community was not involved in the decision, and quite a few Fedora users are most unhappy with the change. Since there was no discussion - not even an announcement of the change - these unhappy users continue to fill the Fedora lists with complaints; it is beginning to look like one of those threads which never really goes away. But, "install everything" has gone away, and appears highly unlikely to return.

A more relevant discussion, perhaps, is this one: what is to happen with evolution in Fedora Core? The state of the FC5 evolution package is evidently so poor that some Red Hat developers are suggesting that it should be shoved out to Fedora Extras, or dropped altogether:

Evolution in extras is a bad idea. Evolution in core is a worse idea. What other as good as unmaintained large buggy package exposed to external attack and with known unfixed DoS bugs (and probably worse yet to be found) do we ship.

Evolution belongs in the bitbucket.

(Alan Cox).

The state of evolution is a bit of a problem. It has been pushed for some time as the mail user agent for Red Hat and Fedora systems; it is also the only mail client with its particular combination of email and calendar features. Quite a few Fedora (and RHEL) users depend on it heavily. So the chances are that evolution is not truly destined for the bit bucket.

There appear to be two issues here. One is that the core evolution project has been on hold for some time. There is a new set of developers working on evolution, and there are signs that the process is beginning to move again - though some observers are not yet convinced. The other issue is that the evolution package within Fedora is unmaintained, and has been for some time. This is a different sort of problem: Red Hat is actively trying to hire somebody to maintain the evolution package, but has not yet found anybody. Until that position can be filled, the evolution package in Fedora is likely to continue to languish.

An interesting side note on this discussion is that some participants have complained about Red Hat engineers suggesting the removal of Evolution. It seems that Red Hat folks have a duty to not scare the users that way. But the truth of the matter is that we cannot have it both ways: if we want to have a vibrant and open Fedora development community, the engineers involved must be able to speak their minds.

Meanwhile, the Ubuntu community has run into a different sort of issue. The original Ubuntu distribution was very much GNOME-based, with a KDE-based version ("Kubuntu") being somewhat of a second-class citizen. Last November, however, Mark Shuttleworth announced that Kubuntu would become "a first class distribution within the Ubuntu community." From the outside, it would appear that things have happened that way; Kubuntu releases happen at about the same time as "plain" Ubuntu releases, and Kubuntu has a large and (seemingly) happy user community.

As of this writing, however, visitors to the Kubuntu.de site are greeted with a protest message rather than the normal resources found there. It seems that some of the developers working on Kubuntu are not particularly happy with their relationship with Canonical. They do not feel that Kubuntu is, yet, a "first-class distribution."

The protest appears to be lead by Andreas Mueller, a co-founder of the Kubuntu project and the maintainer of Kubuntu.de. Mr. Mueller is a volunteer Kubuntu developer, not currently on the Canonical payroll. There are a number of complaints being voiced, and it is not entirely clear what the real problem is. Discussion on the lists suggests that a misunderstanding over administrative accounts is part of it. The core, however, may well be this:

Kubuntu needs more paid developers. Even though Canonical says that there is one paid developer for GNOME and one KDE (seb128/jriddell), the rest of the paid developers rather tend to support GNOME. It would be reasonable to pay at least 2-3 more developers to balance, because only providing KDE-packages is not enough.

A cynical observer might be tempted to conclude that Mr. Mueller is trying to shame Canonical into hiring him.

It is hard to say whether Canonical is putting sufficient resources into Kubuntu or not. It is true that there has been no great outpouring of support for this protest on the Kubuntu mailing lists. Kubuntu users seem generally content with their lot. Hopefully this disagreement can be resolved without changing that situation.

Some distribution disagreements

Posted Apr 13, 2006 3:25 UTC (Thu) by whiprush (guest, #23428) [Link] (12 responses)

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.

Some distribution disagreements

Posted Apr 13, 2006 3:33 UTC (Thu) by jbailey (guest, #16890) [Link] (8 responses)

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,
Jeff Bailey

Some distribution disagreements

Posted Apr 13, 2006 4:12 UTC (Thu) by marduk (guest, #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] (4 responses)

I have an IMAP mailbox with 14,000 messages and Evolution shows only about 4,900. And the
4,900 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
features. This article is the first I've heard that the development of Evolution has come to a practical
halt. Is that really true? What happened to the core group from Ximian? I hope they're not all
diverted over to, uh, MonoDevelop or whatever. I relatedly hope that Evo isn't going to be re-
implemented in Mono.

Some distribution disagreements

Posted Apr 13, 2006 12:53 UTC (Thu) by jbailey (guest, #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] (2 responses)

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] (1 responses)

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 (guest, #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 (guest, #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.
Novell's marketing exclaims that Evo is a drop in replacement for Outlook with their support for Exchange servers.

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] (1 responses)

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 (guest, #2786) [Link]

Does e.g. Thunderbird work any better performance-wise?

Some distribution disagreements

Posted Apr 13, 2006 7:35 UTC (Thu) by ronaldcole (guest, #1462) [Link]

And now that "Install Everything" is gone from FC5 because Red Hat chose to "fix" a non-broken feature, it can't get tested or fixed and will be broken when FC5 becomes RHEL5. I can't wait! Oh, hold on, I can and probably will. After all, why encourage Red Hat's bad behavior by throwing more money at them?

In fact, I'm so jaded that I predict that "Install Everything" in RHEL5 will be broken/unfixed longer than iptables module unloading hanging on shutdown on RHL7.3 or rhn_applet not notifying about security errata anymore after running up2date once on RHEL3 *and* RHEL4!!

Kontact?

Posted Apr 13, 2006 8:58 UTC (Thu) by morhippo (guest, #334) [Link]

Are there still features present in evolution that are missing in kontact? If not, maybe Fedora could just switch to kontact. It appears well-maintained and is much more modular.

It's probably the general gnome desktop bias is stopping Redhat/Fedora, from seriously considering such a step...

Some distribution disagreements

Posted Apr 13, 2006 11:21 UTC (Thu) by bk (guest, #25617) [Link]

Evolution is part of core GNOME, so if they don't ship evo they're not really shipping GNOME. That would be a shame given the support RH/Fedora has traditionally given GNOME over the years.

Is Evolution dying?

Posted Apr 13, 2006 11:36 UTC (Thu) by walles (guest, #954) [Link] (2 responses)

This article implies that Evolution is dying. If it is, I would find it very interesting to read an article about Evolution, and how it got to its current state (hint, hint).

Since I don't know of any other program with both support for Microsoft shared calendars and for synchronization with my Palm Pilot, I've started thinking of moving from Thunderbird to Evolution. But if Evolution is dying, maybe I should just keep ignoring the problem of the corporate shared calendars...

Is Evolution dying?

Posted Apr 13, 2006 13:50 UTC (Thu) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link]

No, I don't think evolution is dying, the article wasn't meant to convey that idea. It is in need of some attention, though, both within Fedora and upstream. Upstream looks like it is happening again, Fedora is at least trying to find somebody to do the job. This is a situation which should improve...

kontact

Posted Apr 13, 2006 13:59 UTC (Thu) by astrophoenix (guest, #13528) [Link]

I don't have a palm, so can't comment on that.

but, at work I have to deal with microsoft exchange. fortunately, they've
turned on the exchange imap server. with that on, I can download my email
with kmail. I can click on 'accept' in a meeting request in kmail, and it
gets added to my calendar in korganizer. the only irritation is that I
have to click on the outlook web access link in the message to send an
accepting reply to the meeting organizer (I haven't been able to get kmail
to send a reply in a format that exchange understands). but still, in
about 4 clicks in kde I can add the meeting to korganizer and send a reply
to exchange.

the other nice thing is that I can take the .ics files which korganizer
creates, copy them to my mac, and ical there reads them as is. which means
I can then sync the calendars onto my ipod. (I know there are ways to sync
the ipod from linux, but I haven't cared enough so far to look into it)

Some distribution disagreements

Posted Apr 13, 2006 13:38 UTC (Thu) by nhasan (guest, #1699) [Link] (5 responses)

"it is also the only mail client with its particular combination of email and calendar features"

Jon...are you really serious? I think you did a review of Kontact a few months ago. Please get out of your Gnome centric world. Lot of your readers are KDE users and developers too :)

Some distribution disagreements

Posted Apr 13, 2006 14:03 UTC (Thu) by astrophoenix (guest, #13528) [Link]

ya, I'm kind of curious as to what features evolution has which kontact
doesn't. I would try to run evo myself, but I've tried to run it in the
past and have never been able to get it to do anything for me; usually the
fonts were weird (so all the text was white on a white background) so now
I don't really want to spend any time on it.

Some distribution disagreements

Posted Apr 13, 2006 15:02 UTC (Thu) by cventers (guest, #31465) [Link] (3 responses)

Having used both, my impression was that the only thing Kontact (KMail)
lacked that Evolution had was the Exchange connector. But in general, I
think Kontact was much more of a polished product, and despite its
(rather) large memory usage at times, it didn't constantly _leak_ like
multiple versions of Evolution.

Kontact also handled calendars properly; Evolution always seemed to be
too buggy in this area to use.

Some distribution disagreements

Posted Apr 13, 2006 17:02 UTC (Thu) by hingo (guest, #14792) [Link] (2 responses)

Yup, I just have to chime in. I know there are plenty of people who's world view is limited to "evolution is better than mutt, and I used to read email with emacs...", but seriously Jon, you are the nr 1 Linux journalist on the planet!

Fact is, kmail was a perfect mail client at least 5 years ago (longer, but since I don't remember exactly, I'll leave it at that). Even when the KDE calendar was a separate app, Kmail had all the features an old Eudora user would expect, combined with all the features a UNIX user would expect like good keyboard navigation, paranoid about HTML mail, not trying to send HTML mail despite your best efforts, paranoid about attachments and whatnot.

I understand that Evolution was an important project for the man who started Gnome, but a graphical mail client was never a missing part of the Linux desktop.

Actually, this all reminds me of the time when Eric Raymond wrote a long essay complaining that we don't know how to do good desktop systems, and used printing as an example. When reading it you'd realise that he was using Red Hat (or Fedora, can't remember how long ago this was and am using gprs so you'll have to google yourself), Gnome and CUPS own web based print management tools. What next? Complain that there are no industry standard sql databases for Linux, and that MySQL should have more features from SQL Server?

K*

Posted Apr 13, 2006 17:20 UTC (Thu) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] (1 responses)

Well, sorry if I've slighted kmail and kontact - certainly wasn't my intent. I (obviously) wasn't thinking about them at all.

Perhaps it's a time for an update of the grumpy editor's look at graphical email clients. With calendars figured in this time. I'll put it on the list.

Evolution's old "Key Folders" pane

Posted Apr 14, 2006 1:16 UTC (Fri) by mgb (guest, #3226) [Link]

If the Grumpy Editor ever finds an IMAP client with a panel for frequently used mailboxes so that one can quickly file and access one's messages - as one could in Evolution One - this one for one would be extremely grateful.

Some distribution disagreements

Posted Apr 13, 2006 17:37 UTC (Thu) by mattdm (subscriber, #18) [Link] (3 responses)

I strongly disagree with the characterization that the Fedora community was not involved in the decision to remove the "Everything" option. In fact, this idea was suggested by community members over five years ago, and is just now. See this bug from August 2000, for example (although please don't contribute to the noise about how great or not great specific individual packages are -- that's a separate issue).

And that's not the first time it's come up. This has been in discussion for a long time.

Some distribution disagreements

Posted Apr 13, 2006 19:24 UTC (Thu) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link] (2 responses)

There was also a discussion of removing it several times on the list during the FC5 track.

Some distribution disagreements

Posted Apr 13, 2006 19:29 UTC (Thu) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] (1 responses)

Ah, but those discussions were all after it had already been removed.

Some distribution disagreements

Posted Apr 13, 2006 21:42 UTC (Thu) by pjones (subscriber, #31722) [Link]

Well, yes and no.

I don't really think it's fair to say the community didn't discuss the change. When it comes down to it, this is a technical change in a package, albiet a very important and visible package.

In general, in Fedora we leave decisions about individual packages up to the maintainer of those packages, and those of packages required by them for their funcionality. In this case, the package is anaconda, and there's actually a fairly strong community of users, both Fedora/RHEL and other distros, using it and contributing. This change has been discussed plenty of times in *that* community, and it's near universally agreed that it's the right thing to do.

There was community involvement; fedora-devel-list wasn't where it all took place.

Asside from that, "community" does not mean "democracy". It's nice when we can get concencus from everybody that every change is good, but for any Open Source software to work, somebody has the power and responsibility of making decisions, even unpopular ones, and somebody else, who might not like the change, doesn't hold enough sway to rule against it.

If people want to the power to make or stop changes like this one, they need to become involved in more ways than simply posting about their dismay to the list. Some people have, and some people haven't. As far as I know, all of the people who are actively involved with anaconda development, especially with regards to package selection, support the removal of the "everything" option.

Sorry for the rant.

Kubuntu does appear second class

Posted Apr 18, 2006 10:10 UTC (Tue) by alspnost (guest, #2763) [Link]

Regarding the Kubuntu issue, I have to say that my impression from *using* it is that it's second class. I've been playing with the latest Dapper flights, and Ubuntu with Gnome 2.14 has become a really solid and highly polished distribution. Kubuntu, on the other hand, is buggy and flakey. I'm a regular KDE user, and generally prefer it. But my distinct impression is that the KDE packages in Kubuntu aren't getting enough attention, and are thus far buggier than the Gnome packages.