[Sheflug] Evolution, Ximian in general...

[nospam [at] alexhudson.com]

I wonder if I can ask for a quick show of hands.. who uses Ximian Gnome
here?

As you probably have heard me witter about a while ago, I'm currently using
it, along with some test apps such as Evolution. And Ximian's distribution
system is beginning to get my goat..

Firstly, evolution. This is kind of the lesser remark, because this is still
beta software, and I should be glad I get to use it at all :) But, I now
have three different versions of it on various machines, because of Ximian
upgrade policy. Firstly, my home desktop (Debian/testing) has lines in apt
sources pointing at the ximian servers to download apps. 'apt-get install
evolution' tells me my version - 0.8 - is the latest available. Next,
another machine I have (RedHat-based) thinks 0.9 is the latest version
available - but this machine uses Helix-Update, which seems to either have
access to more up-to-date servers, or the .debs are just plain old. Lastly,
my work desktop (again Redhat) installed version 0.10 for me this morning.
How did it find this version? Red Carpet. So, Ximian have three update
channels (apt, Helix-update, Red Carpet) all of which have different
software versions, one of which is obsoleted, the other two being
distro-dependent. Grrrrr.

But, apart from that, Evolution 0.10 rocks. GnuPG works like a charm through
it, and attachment-handling is much better, although it still insists on
quoting mime attachments in replies, rather than re-attaching and offering
removal ... :(

But anyway, back to distribution. I can name more and more apps which don't
install well on Debian, some of the them pretty major apps, it seems like
the world is kind of standardising on the RedHats etc.. and I'm not just
talking about only shipping RPMs, because I have stuff which isn't in RPMs
but still doesn't work on Debian. Ximian seem to not updated their Debian
stuff in ages (and their mirror _is_labelled unstable, rather than stable,
IIRC). I suspect the same goes for Storm / Caldera, possibly Slack, etc..
and then there's IBM's chosen four... hmm, maybe this is it..

Cheers,

Alex.
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