unity-design team mailing list archive

[Conscious User <conscioususer@xxxxxxx>]

Le mardi 18 mai 2010 à 22:06 +0200, Frederik Nnaji a écrit :
> Yes, you're right, we don't need the software suite Evolution anymore.


I'm interested to know how many people in this list agree with the
above statement, or at least consider it a possibility open for
discussion, before effectively going for the clock discussion.

I personally think Evolution does most of its tasks (namely mail,
calendar and contacts) very well. The problem is its monolithic
nature and overall design philosophy that makes it very difficult
to work well with Ayatana in general. It would be much better if
it was a set of decoupled applications that communicated between
themselves via dbus, or something like that.

The current design is not only based on a single window for all
functionalities, but this single window is allowed to open
multiple times. Not only this is redundant and inefficient, but
also creates difficulties such as Messaging Menu integration:
for example, how implement window hiding if there's no such
thing as "the window"? (multiple instances can be open)

Geoff Goehle jumped to a lot of hoops in order to implement this
functionality in evolution-indicator. Including patching
Evolution itself. Unfortunately, this is not very maintainable
in the long run, because some of the patching go directly
against upstream wishes.

Integrating Evolution better with Ayatana is not a matter of
fixing problems. It involves working around design decisions
clash with upstream with every change. It doesn't sound
worthy.

I like Evolution. I use it. But the more I think about it, the
more it looks like an alien in the Ayatana world.

I'd like to hear the list's thoughts on this.

PS: Notice I said does *most* of its tasks very well. The
exception is note-taking, on which Tomboy is much superior.