Evolution is the integrated mail, calendar and address book
distributed suite from Ximian, Inc.
See http://www.ximian.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 using Evolution, you should subscribe to the Evolution
mailing list. If you are interested in hacking on it, you should
subscribe to the Evolution Hackers mailing list. Send mail to
"evolution-request@ximian.com" or
"evolution-hackers-request@ximian.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 are mailing list archives available at
http://lists.ximian.com/archives/public/evolution/ and
http://lists.ximian.com/archives/public/evolution-hackers/
There is also an #evolution IRC channel on irc.gnome.org.
IF IT DOESN'T WORK
------------------
Did you read the "How to build" section below?
If the configure script complains that you don't have a library that
you know you have installed, it usually means either that you've
installed things into multiple prefixes (see the bits on GNOME_PATH
below) or (if you're on Linux) that you installed the "foo" package
but forgot the "foo-devel" or "foo-dev" packages.
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
------------------
First you have to decide whether you want to install Evolution (and
its dependencies) into the same prefix as the rest of your GNOME
install, or into a new prefix. Installing everything into the same
prefix as the rest of your GNOME install will make it much easier to
build and run programs, and easier to switch between using packages
and building it yourself, but it may also 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" or "autogen.sh"
when building the other packages you need. For example:
./configure --prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc --localstatedir=/var/lib
--localstatedir is needed to make the docs integrate with scrollkeeper
and needs to point to the directory containing the scrollkeeper indices
which are in: gnome-config --localstatedir
If you build in another prefix instead, you will need to set the
GNOME_PATH environment variable (and ACLOCAL_FLAGS as well if building
from CVS) to include the prefix you install into. For example:
export GNOME_PATH=/usr/local
export ACLOCAL_FLAGS="-I /usr/local/share/aclocal"
(Assuming your shell is bash, and you installed into /usr/local.) You
need to set GNOME_PATH both during compiling AND when you run
evolution. Remember also that 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 and ${prefix}/lib in your LD_LIBRARY_PATH.
DEPENDENCIES
------------
The following required 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 Ximian
GNOME ( http://www.ximian.com/desktop/ ). Other packages may be
available from the Ximian GNOME evolution preview mirror.
If installing from packages, remember that you need both the runtime
and -devel packages for each library.
- xml-i18n-tools - latest from xml-i18n-tools-stable-1-x branch in
GNOME CVS (0.8.2 is too old)
- scrollkeeper - 0.1.4 or later (*)
- gnome-xml - 1.8.10 or later in the 1.0 series, but not from the 2.0
series (If you get this from GNOME CVS, use the tag "LIB_XML_1_BRANCH".)
(*)
- gnome-print - 0.25 or later (*)
- gdk-pixbuf - 0.9.0 or later (*)
- ORBit - 0.5.8 or later (*) (If you get this from GNOME CVS, use the
tag "orbit-stable-0-5".)
- oaf - 0.6.2 or later (If you get this from GNOME CVS, use the tag
"oaf-stable-0-6")
*** If you are using oaf from CVS, you should use the flag
*** "--disable-more-warnings" when configure, or it may fail to
*** build.
- gnome-vfs - 1.0.0 or later (If you get this from GNOME CVS, use
the tag "gnome-vfs-1-0")
*** If you are using gnome-vfs from CVS, you should use the flag
*** "--disable-more-warnings" when configuring, or it may fail to
*** build.
- libglade - 0.14 or later
- bonobo - 1.0.3 or later
*** Note that bonobo must be installed with the same --prefix as
*** either gnome-libs or evolution for the Makefiles to work
*** properly.
- gal (GNOME Application Library) - 0.18.1 or later
- gtkhtml - later than 0.16.1
- SOUP - 0.7.x
*** If you are compiling from CVS, grab the soup-0-7 branch.
Other non-GNOME Dependencies:
- Berkeley's libdb - 3.1.17
db3 is available from http://www.sleepycat.com. Make sure to get
3.1.17, it isn't the latest version.
--- IMPORTANT WARNING ---
The on-disk format of DB files has been changing between versions
2, 3 and 4. Also, because of the libdb API, there is no way to
easily handle the different formats from within the application.
For this reason, Evolution has chosen to use one specific version
of the library (version 3) and stick to it, so that users do not
need to convert their addressbook files to use them with
different version of Evolution.
That's why Evolution REQUIRES libdb 3.1.17, and NO OTHER VERSION.
If you force the check to accept a version different from 3.1.17,
your binary of Evolution will be using a different format from
the chosen one; this means that it will not be able to read
addressbook databases created by other versions of Evolution
which were compiled in the standard way. Also, we DO NOT
GUARRANTEE that Evolution will work with different versions of
libdb at all, even if it can be trivially made to compile against
them.
SPECIAL NOTE FOR BINARY PACKAGERS:
If you are making binary packages for end-users (e.g. if you are
a distribution vendor), please statically link Evolution to
Berkeley DB 3.1.17, as mandated by the configure.in check. DO
NOT patch configure.in to work around the check. Forcing the
check to link to a different version of the library will only
give headaches and pain to your users, who will see their
addressbook disappear and will complain to us (the Evolution
team) about losing their data.
Besides, libdb will be linked statically, which means that your
distribution doesn't actually need to ship DB 3.1.17 itself
separately.
The Evolution team will be infinitely grateful for your
co-operation. Thanks.
COMPILING BERKELEY DB
---------------------
If you don't have 3.1.17 installed on your system or Evolution doesn't
detect it for some reason, here is a way to get Evolution to link to
it without messing up your system installation.
* Get the Sleepycat tarball from:
http://www.sleepycat.com/update/snapshot/db-3.1.17.tar.gz
* Install the content somewhere _other_ than the evolution source tree.
e.g: NOT evolution/db-3.1.17
* Compile according to instructions, but installing into some custom
prefix, for example:
../dist/configure --prefix=/home/user/berkeleydb-3.1.17
* Autogen Evolution specifying that it has to look for the DB
library there, for example:
./autogen.sh --prefix=/opt/gnome
--with-db3-includes=/home/user/berkeleydb-3.1.17/include
--with-db3-libs=/home/user/berkeleydb-3.1.17/lib
COMPILING PALM PILOT SUPPORT
----------------------------
If you want support for PalmPilot syncing (currently experimental so
please back up your pilot) you will also need to do the following:
1) pilot-link 0.9.5
http://www.pilot-link.org
2) gnome-pilot 0.1.61
http://www.eskil.org/gnome-pilot/
3) evolution
In your evolution source directory do ./autogen.sh --prefix=<evo-prefix>
--with-pisock=<pilot-link-prefix> --enable-pilot-conduits=yes
make
make install
SSL SUPPORT
-----------
If you want SSL support (and someday S/MIME), you will also need libnspr4 and
libnss3 which can be found at http://www.mozilla.org.
Once you have libnspr4 and libnss3 (and their respective includes) installed,
in your evolution source directory do:
./autogen.sh --prefix=<evo-prefix> --with-nspr-includes=<nspr-includes-prefix>
--with-nspr-libs=<nspr-libs-prefix> --with-nss-includes=<nss-includes-prefix>
--with-nss-libs=<nss-libs-prefix>
You'll need to `cp ~/.mozilla/default/*.db ~/evolution` on you've
installed Evolution in order to get a functional SSL-enabled
Evolution.
WARNING: Evolution also comes with OpenSSL support
(--with-openssl-libs and --with-openssl-includes), but it's not very
well tested, and quite unstable at this point. It is recommended that
you use the NSPR-based SSL support instead.
NEWSGROUP (NNTP) SUPPORT
------------------------
Experimental support for NNTP is enabled if you use the --enable-nntp
configure option, but it's currently unmaintained and highly unstable
and experimental.
