path: root/README

Evolution is the integrated mail, calendar and address book
distributed suite from Ximian, Inc.

See http://www.ximian.com/products/evolution for more information.

If you are using Evolution, you may wish to subscribe to the Evolution
users mailing list. If you are interested in contributing to
development on it, you should certainly subscribe to the Evolution
Hackers mailing list. Visit
http://developer.ximian.com/community/lists.html to subscribe to
Ximian mailing lists. 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.

Help for Evolution is available in the user manual (select "Help" from
the menu after running the application), at the Ximian knowledge base
(http://support.ximian.com), in the Evolution man page (run "man
evolution" at the command line), and in the --help strings (run
"evolution --help" at the command line).

The rest of this file is dedicated to building Evolution.

PROBLEMS BUILDING EVOLUTION
---------------------------

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
------------------

[FIXME: This section is badly out of date.]

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
------------

In order to compile Evolution, you need all the GNOME 2.0 (or later)
core libraries to be installed on your system.

Evolution also requires libgnomeprint and libgnomeprintui 2.2 (which
are part of GNOME 2.2); so if you are compiling against a GNOME 2.0
development platform, you will also need to install these libraries.
If you are compiling against GNOME 2.2, you don't need to do so.
libgnomeprint and libgnomeprintui are available from
ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources.

In addition to the GNOME development libraries, Evolution depends on
the following packages:

 - gal - 1.99.2 or later

 - gtkhtml - 3.0.1 or later 

 - libsoup - 1.99.12 or later

All these libraries are available from
ftp://ftp.gnome.or/pub/GNOME/sources , or can be fetched from GNOME
CVS (just check out the trunk).

Other dependencies:

 - Berkeley's libdb - 3.1.17

   db3 is available from http://www.sleepycat.com. Make sure to get
   3.1.17, which 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 you will also need recent
versions of:

1) pilot-link 
http://www.pilot-link.org

2) gnome-pilot
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
mozilla-nspr and mozilla-nss, which can be found at
http://www.mozilla.org.

Once you have those libraries (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>


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.