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: GNOME_PATH=/usr/local (You need to do this both during compiling AND when you run evolution.) - 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. - 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