[855] in Athena User Interface
Evolution status report
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg Hudson)
Mon Aug 13 12:31:27 2001
Date: Mon, 13 Aug 2001 12:31:24 -0400
Message-Id: <200108131631.MAA07270@egyptian-gods.MIT.EDU>
From: Greg Hudson <ghudson@MIT.EDU>
To: aui@mit.edu
I downloaded and built evolution 0.12 yesterday on my laptop (which
required upgrading a lot of components; to make things easy for
myself, I scribbled over my laptop's /usr/athena, since it's not in a
very consistent state anyway). My observations:
* It defaults to using its own mail store format in the user's
homedir, which is not what we would want.
* It has krb4 IMAP support but no Hesiod support.
* Dan says it doesn't have krb5 support because GSSAPI was a
lot harder to deal with than krb4 (which I agree with).
* I didn't see any evidence of MH support, which could affect
our ability to do a smooth transition depending on how we
decide our transition should work.
* I had trouble getting it to check for new mail on the IMAP
server; I think that feature is just not implemented yet.
* It has calendar, task list, and contact list applications as
well as a mail reader application. That's probably not a
terrible thing, assuming they don't create big support
issues.
* It displays unread messages in bold and read messages in
normal type... but its heuristic for what is a "read
message" is a message which either occupies only a single
screen or which you have paged down once in. So if you
wander down the message list with the down arrow,
single-screen messages will turn non-bold but the rest will
stay bold. That's a little odd.
* I managed to hang it once.
* It starts up a bazillion processes, which don't necessarily
die if you ^C it. (In fact, it ships with a "killev" script
to kill off all the leftover Evolution processes.) Of
course, it's still in beta; perhaps that will be fixed up
before release.
* My impression is that it puts a little bit too much advanced
functionality on the menus for a naive user (several items
related to filters and virtual folders), and that the menus
are a bit disorganized. (Customizing mail settings is a
"Tool" rather than an "Edit"; sending mail messages is on
the "File" menu; resending a sent message is a "File"
operation but forwarding a message is an "Action"; etc..
And what kind of a menu name is "Action"? Do items in other
menus have no effect?)
* It does a fairly nice job of formatting text mail messages
(assuming they were written according to established
convention): quoted text is in lighter type, email addresses
and URLs are clickable, it can display HTML, etc..
* It is very clear how to search within a folder.
* It has a threaded message list feature which is kind of
neat.
