[357] in Athena User Interface
Re: Evolution
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Dan Winship)
Wed Aug 9 14:19:07 2000
Message-Id: <200008091822.OAA06397@twelve-monkeys.helixcode.com>
To: Richard Tibbetts <tibbetts@MIT.EDU>
Cc: aui@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 09 Aug 2000 02:59:04 EDT."
<200008090659.CAA01304@alice-whacker.mit.edu>
Date: Wed, 09 Aug 2000 14:22:18 -0400
From: Dan Winship <danw@helixcode.com>
FYI, http://bugzilla.helixcode.com/ has some state on what we are
planning. (But not much state on what we are explicitly not planning.)
> 1) Does/will Evolution have a tty client that our users can use on the
> dialups?
It does not currently. I've thought about writing MH-like command-line
tools. It would probably work by launching the evolution-mail
component, leaving it in the background, and having the MH commands
speak to it via CORBA. (So once you ran a command, you'd have the
evolution-mail control running in the background taking up memory, but
the command-line utils [which would probably really all be the same
program looking at argv[0]] would be smaller and not have to do nearly
as much gunk at startup.)
I can provide advice and help to anyone who wants to look at doing
this. :)
If anyone did the work to do this, someone else would probably end up
making a pine/mutt-like UI, because there are lots of pine/mutt fans
on the evolution lists.
> 2) Does/will Evolution support an mh mail store? If not, how hard will
> it be for us to hack it up?
There is now (as of about a week ago) an mh-like mail store. It
doesn't do .mh_sequences but is otherwise pretty much MH. It will
probably be modified to at least optionally do .mh_sequences.
Right now Evolution wants to "own" all of your mail stores, meaning
that they have to be in ~/evolution, and it reserves the right to be
really slow at startup if you change them behind its back. The "must
be in ~/evolution" part may change. Lots of people want to share
folders between Evolution and another mailer. (Although maybe they
wouldn't want that any more if there were commandline frontends.)
Then again, you could tell people that if they want to use MH and
Evolution, they should change Path in their .mh_profile.
Greg says:
> someone with Helixcode connections answer it.
s/c/ C/
> For mail, though, I'll note that in the long run we'd like to have
> users using IMAP mail stores by default (hopefully with Kerberos 5, if
> we can get support for that on the IMAP servers, but Kerberos 4 will
> do in a pinch).
Evolution already supports KPOP, although the configure.in code is not
very robust. (I wrote it to deal with how I thought things worked in
NetBSD current, and then modified it to also deal with how things
actually work in NetBSD current. I haven't ever tried configuring
Kerberos support on any machine other than the one on my desk here.)
I was going to do IMAP KERBEROS_V4 support but then discovered that it
requires properly handling IMAP command continuations (an obscure
feature used by basically nothing in IMAP except the AUTHENTICATION
command), which our IMAP provider doesn't do yet. But I'll do it at
some point. The MIT PO servers don't do GSSAPI, so I can't test that
against them, although I could get the CMU people here to test it
against Andrew.
> although we will need a transition path for existing MH users.
A nice import/export tool is planned, but we've done no work on it
yet.
-- Dan
