I recently upgraded from Ubuntu Hardy to Ubuntu Intrepid. Most of my GNOME software worked well upon upgrade, there were even some improvements. However, a major piece of GNOME software that I use every single day and that is important to both my personal life and business stopped functioning correctly: Evolution.
It's clear to me that from 2.22 -> 2.24.3, Evolution redesigned its backend data store and unleashed this onto users as a "stable release" with disastrous effects. If you look around this list, you'll find lots of discontent. Basic things that existed in Evolution 2.22 -- basic features -- no longer work. For example: * Search folders or searches including "unread message" status does not work (regression) * Declaring a search folder of a search folder (vfolder of a vfolder) no longer works (regression). For me and many others on the list, this essentially meant that all of our vfolders stopped working altogether, meaning that we had to reorganize our mail in a different way. (regression) * Unread message counts are incorrect vis-a-vis the reality. For example, every time I send a message, my inbox's unread message count goes up by 1. This despite the fact that there are no unread messages there. Others report even larger divergences. (regression) * The "Unmatched" VFolder no longer exists. (regression) It turns out that these fixes still have no been committed even in Evo 2.26, released in March. Brian J. Murrell has been rightfully indignant about this. He has been living with these regressions for months. I consider Evolution to be one of the core pieces of software that GNOME offers, and one that the GNOME release team should carefully watch when declaring new "stable" releases of GNOME. I think that you guys have done the GNOME community a major disservice by releasing 2.24/2.26 as "stable" GNOME software. I think the fact that Evo was allowed to be released at this new version with so many regressions is really a sad state of affairs, and suggests that GNOME needs to reconsider its release process. I'm going to be contacting the GNOME release team about this. Evo worked fine at 2.22, and I see very few improvements between 2.22 and 2.24, only regressions. That suggests that someone on the Evo team thought it was a good idea to "redesign the internals" without really committing to what that entailed -- releasing the redesigned version to a small "beta" community before declaring it to be the "stable version" released to thousands of production users and including in all major distributions as the latest and greatest stable software from GNOME. As a software engineer myself, I would never do unto my users what the evo developers have done unto theirs. Do you understand that even a *single regression* can cause users to stop using your software? I don't know what can be done about it now, but this reflects very badly on Evolution and GNOME for me. I'm a long-time GNOME user (~ 10 years), and in recent years as my computer has become more and more integral to my livelihood, as a small business owner and software engineer. I have become more and more hesitant about upgrading to the latest GNOME versions. That's why I was still running Ubuntu Hardy as of a week ago. At least it worked. I upgraded to Intrepid only because Jaunty is right around the corner, and I figured this would at least represent a "stable" snapshot of software. I guess I was wrong. What does it say when some of GNOME's most committed users (users who have hacking credentials -- I know C, GTK+, and GObject!) are hesitant to upgrade to your latest stable releases? Even worse, what does it say when their hesitancy is justified? I really want the best for GNOME and Evolution and want to see this situation improve. I don't know what can be done about it now from the Evolution side, but at the very least, a "mea culpa" from the core developers would be a good start. For those of us in the community (like myself) that have some hacking credentials and could help fix the mess you created, some pointers for *how* to help you guys out would be a good second step. Andrew _______________________________________________ Evolution-list mailing list Evolution-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/evolution-list
