[4249] in Release_7.7_team
Re: Agenda item for next meeting: Stand alone Evolution under
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg Hudson)
Fri Mar 19 17:25:13 2004
From: Greg Hudson <ghudson@MIT.EDU>
To: Bill Cattey <wdc@MIT.EDU>
Cc: release-team@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: <1079726017.26004.2.camel@tokata.mit.edu>
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Date: Fri, 19 Mar 2004 17:23:48 -0500
On Fri, 2004-03-19 at 14:53, Bill Cattey wrote:
> What configurations were made to Evolution as we integrated it for
> Athena 9.3 under Red Hat Enterprise 3?
That seems more easily answered by me at a keyboard than by us at a
meeting. Here are the local changes we have to Evolution, relative to
RHEL 3, which I'll divide into three categories:
Changes for an AFS shared homedir environment
---------------------------------------------
* Disable caching of IMAP messages inside AFS homedirs. (Which may
also break some vfolders stuff; not confirmed.) If the homedir is not
inside /mit or /afs, this change does not apply.
* When creating the ~/evolution subdir initially, set AFS permissions
on it so that it's private. If the homedir is not inside /mit or /afs,
this change does not apply.
* Disable index files for local mail folders, since they can't be
shared between Linux and Solaris. This change applies even if the
homedir is not inside /mit or /afs, though it perhaps shouldn't.
Changes to let users "click and go" without initial configuration
-----------------------------------------------------------------
* Add Hesiod support. (username.mail.mit.edu would be easier for us,
if it were supported.)
* When first run, pre-configure an MIT mail account (IMAP with krb4
auth, use Hesiod to find mail server, mail gets sent using sendmail
which does SMTP auth, local folders are used for Drafts and Sent) and
also an MH mail account if the user has MH mail. Also pre-configure the
local time zone.
* Some changes to emphasize the MIT mail account over the local mail
folders:
- In the summary window, if you click on "Mail summary" you get the
MIT mail inbox instead of the local mail inbox.
- Put local folders last, not first, in the folders list.
- Make the "Inbox" shortcut in the shortcuts bar point to the MIT
mail inbox.
Local bugfixes and miscellaneous changes for a better user experience
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* Don't demand that email addresses contain an '@' sign. (So one can
send mail to "wdc" instead of to "wdc@mit.edu".)
* Some bugfixes to the display of text/richtext mail.
* When creating temporary files to hold attachment contents, put them
in /var/tmp instead of in /tmp, and make them read-only so that people
don't edit the temporary file and lose the result.
> Which of those configurations make sense to bring to stand-alone
> users?
I don't really know what the parameters are for stand-alone Linux
support, but I'll note that all of the above changes require code hacks,
and it should certainly be possible to use the stock RHEL 3 Evolution
binary at MIT, given documentation on how to configure it. RHEL 3 even
appears to build Evolution with Kerberos support (unlike RH9), which
might be preferrable to SSL for some users (it means you need tickets,
but also means you don't have to type in your password to connect to the
IMAP or SMTP server).
If we were going to ship users a custom-built Evolution binary with some
of the above changes, it would have to be different from the Athena
binary because the standalone machine wouldn't necessarily have an
Athena-configured sendmail, so Evolution would need to be configured to
send mail using its own built-in SMTP authentication instead of using
sendmail.
