Evolution is the integrated mail, calendar and address book
distributed suite from Helix Code, Inc.
See http://www.helixcode.com/apps/evolution.php3 for more information.
Note that Evolution is still beta. This means it may delete all of
your mail if you give it the chance.
If you are interested in hacking on Evolution, you should subscribe to
the Evolution mailing list. Send mail to
"evolution-request@helixcode.com" with the word "subscribe" in the
body of the message. If you are planning to work on any part of
Evolution, please send mail to the mailing list first, to avoid
duplicated effort (and to make sure that you aren't basing your work
on interfaces that are expected to change).
There is a mailing list archive available at
http://lists.helixcode.com/archives/public/evolution/
There is also an #evolution IRC channel on irc.gnome.org.
HOW TO BUILD EVOLUTION
----------------------
*** READ THIS BEFORE YOU START BUILDING ANYTHING! ***
Evolution depends on a large number of unreleased and rapidly-changing
libraries. Some of these libraries in turn depend on other unreleased
and rapidly-changing libraries.
Building Evolution is HARD, and it's going to stay hard until all of
the libraries it depends on stabilize, and there's nothing we can do
to make it any easier until then.
General Principles
------------------
There are two things you have to decide earlier on: whether or not to
install Evolution in the same prefix as the rest of your GNOME
install, and whether to use GOAD or OAF.
- Installing everything into the same prefix as the rest of your
GNOME install will it much easier to run programs, but may make it
harder to uninstall later.
If you want to install into the same prefix as the rest of GNOME,
type:
gnome-config --prefix
gnome-config --sysconfdir
and remember the answers, and pass them to "configure" and
"autogen" when building the other packages you need. Eg:
./configure --prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc
If you do not do this, you will need to set GNOME_PATH to include
the prefix you install into. Eg:
export GNOME_PATH=/usr/local
(You need to do this both during compiling AND when you run
evolution.)
Remember if you're installing into an odd prefix such as /evolution
that you also need to make sure to put ${prefix}/bin in your PATH.
- GOAD is the "old" (GNOME 1.x series) object activation system. OAF
is the new (unreleased, GNOME 2.x series) system.
As of bonobo 0.14, OAF is the default activation system for Bonobo.
If you want to use OAF, you will need to install the oaf package
before building Bonobo. If you want to save a little time and stick
with GOAD, you should pass the flag "--enable-oaf=no" to bonobo's
configure script.
Note that Nautilus requires OAF, so if you have built or are
planning to build Nautilus as well, you should use OAF.
Dependencies
------------
All of these libraries are available in GNOME CVS, under the given
names. Most (but not all) of them are also available as tarballs on
ftp.gnome.org. The (*)ed packages are available in Helix GNOME.
(http://www.helixcode.com/desktop/)
- gnome-xml - currently, only 1.8.7 works. Earlier versions have a
bug in code that Evolution needs, and the 2.0 branch is not source
or binary compatible. If you get this from GNOME CVS, use the tag
"LIB_XML_1_X". (*)
- gnome-print (whatever version is currently needed by gtkhtml) (*)
- gdk-pixbuf - 0.7.0 or later (*)
- ORBit - 0.5.1 (*) or later from the orbit-stable-0-5 branch in CVS.
(i.e. do 'cvs co -r orbit-stable-0-5 ORBit')
- oaf - 0.3, assuming that you're building with OAF rather than GOAD
(see above). Note that if you build the current CVS version of OAF
rather than the 0.3 release, you will need a newer version of ORBit
than 0.5.1.
- bonobo - Evolution always tracks the latest CVS versions of bonobo.
Released versions will virtually always be too old (although as of
June 2, bonobo 0.15 is recent enough).
*** Note that bonobo must be installed with the same --prefix as
*** either gnome-libs or evolution for the Makefiles to work
*** properly.
- gnome-vfs (released versions are OK currently, but CVS versions are
better. Note that gnome-vfs from CVS requires OAF.)
- libunicode - 0.4 or later, available from
http://www.pango.org/download.shtml
- gtkhtml - 0.4 or later
- libglade (*)
At some point in the future, Evolution will have Pilot sync support,
which will depend on the following libraries. (At the moment, it will
check to see whether or not you have them, but it will not actually do
anything with them.)
- pilot-link (*)
- gnome-pilot (*)
The layout of the source tree is:
addressbook: the Address Book UI
art: graphics used by evolution
calendar: the Calendar UI
camel: libcamel, a messaging library used by the mailer.
Camel is inspired by Sun's JavaMail
(http://java.sun.com/products/javamail/) and the
IMAPv4 spec (RFC 2060).
composer: the message composer UI
data: the .desktop file for Evolution
default_user: initial Evolution config files for new users
devel-docs: entirely inadequate documentation
doc: more adequate documentation
e-util: utility code used by various parts of Evolution
filter: libfilter, a mail filtering library
libibex: an indexing library used by the mailer
libical: a library for the iCalendar format (RFC 2445-2446)
libversit: a library for the vCard (RFC 2425-2426) and vCalendar
(http://www.imc.org/pdi/vcal-10.txt) formats
mail: the mail display UI
shell: the Evolution shell (the main program that launches
the other components)
tests: some test programs
tools: utilities, notably "killev", a script to kill of all
of the Evolution components
widgets: widgets used by Evolution, including the shortcut bar,
ETable, and EText
wombat: Has source code that will load in the addressbook
and calendar backend, and will form the server
process we'll be using
