[224] in athena10
Re: Review of changes to Evolution
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (William Cattey)
Fri May 30 15:32:31 2008
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From: William Cattey <wdc@MIT.EDU>
Date: Fri, 30 May 2008 15:30:23 -0400
To: ghudson@mit.edu
Did the changes to grok MH style folders get accepted upstream?
I still actually use that functionality sometimes. It was not on
your list,
and I'd lost track of whether it was dropped or accepted upstream.
-Bill
----
William Cattey
Linux Platform Coordinator
MIT Information Services & Technology
N42-040M, 617-253-0140, wdc@mit.edu
http://web.mit.edu/wdc/www/
On May 30, 2008, at 12:46 PM, ghudson@MIT.EDU wrote:
> I'm working on fleshing out the project entry for the feature "Users
> can easily read MIT mail using Evolution or Pine." Our work on these
> programs has been fairly extensive over the life of the Athena
> project, so I'm breaking this out into an email discussion and not
> just a blurb in the plan.
>
> I reviewed all of the changes we've made to Evolution in Athena 9.x,
> filtered out the ones which don't seem relevant (including bug fixes,
> which I'm assuming have percolated upstream). The list is:
>
> 1. Make ~/.evolution private when first created
> 2. Pre-configure MIT mail settings on first invocation
> 3. Hesiod support
> 4. Cache messages in /var/tmp in preference to AFS homedirs
> 5. Adjust folder display order so MIT folders appear first
> 6. Avoid using ibex files since they are dependent on byte order
> 7. chmod attachments read-only before opening
> 8. Build with krb4 support
>
> (1-3) can be handled in a wrapper script. Emulating Hesiod support in
> a wrapper script is a little hairy, but adding the Hesiod patch and
> associated build goo in the debathenificator framework is probably
> hairier. Also, our Hesiod patch is a bit frightening. It is
> unfortunate that username.mail.mit.edu does not work with Kerberos
> authentication, especially since it would require only a small tweak
> to fix that, but we can't rely on NIST making changes to the PO
> servers before this fall.
>
> (4) is a performance change. Now that the W20 network has been
> upgraded it might be reasonable to let it lapse. It's certainly still
> *dumb* to use a network fileserver to cache data from a network mail
> store, but it might not be the kind of dumb we have to fix. The patch
> is reasonably clean if we do need to still apply it.
>
> I think we can let (5) lapse. It's not hard to see or identify the
> MIT Mail folder list. If it's possible, we might want the wrapper
> script to change the default name of the homedir mail store from "On
> This Computer" to something more accurate for our environment.
>
> I'm not sure if (6) is still an issue. We will only be supporting
> little-endian machines, but there might be a new related issue due to
> 64-bit machines. For the moment I'm going to say we shoudl let this
> lapse until we identify that
>
> (7) has been adopted upstream, based on observed behavior under Ubuntu
> Hardy. Yay.
>
> (8) is a frustrating point. It requires a package modification to
> address and it would be unnecessary if NIST would enable krb5
> authentication on the PO servers, which in my opinion is long overdue.
> Since none of the other changes require a package modification unless
> (6) rears its head again, this may be the only reason we aren't able
> to use the stock Evolution binary in Athena 10.
>
> The resulting to-do items are:
>
> 1. Create a package named debathena-evolution-wrapper which handles
> ~/.evolution privacy, initial configuration, and Hesiod po server
> lookup.
>
> 2. Create a debathenificator package for Evolution to enable krb4
> support. (Hopefully the code is still there and it's just turned
> off in Ubuntu.)
