rawhide report: 20040715 changes

[Nils Philippsen]

On Thu, 2004-07-15 at 23:31, Paul Thomas wrote:
> On 15/07/2004 18:25 seth vidal wrote:
> > 
> > it'd be a shame to do that. I know some of the PHB's involved(or
> > formerly involved) in the evo team and they're good folks.
> 
> You know the old saying, "the road to ruin's paved with good intent". IME,
> that's a prime source of feature bloat. When I started using GNOME back in
> the 1.2 days, I was sold on the idea of a component-based architecture
> which I saw as following the Unix philosophy of combining a number of
> small, specialist programs to perform an overall task. So we had Balsa as
> the MUA and GNOME Pim providing calendar, appointments and address book. 

Having mail, contacts, calendar as separate programs doesn't have
anything to do with component-based architecture, rather the opposite --
having those as reusable components under a single umbrella was the
idea. Evo did that in the past and got flamed back then (mainly because
components crashed rendering the overall program retarded until
restarted, debugging of it wasn't so easy as well).

To (ab?)use the Unix metaphor, the components were the single programs,
the Evo shell was the script that tied them together and -- like a shell
script -- it was one entity the user saw. Today evolution consists of
only three components, basically the GUI frontend, the backend and the
alarm component (which survives exiting the app so it can wake you up).

Complaining that Evo does too much for a simple mail app doesn't cut it
IMO, because it isn't -- it's one of those beasties that call themselves
"Groupware" or similar terms. Whether you like all of it under umbrella
or not is secondary. If you want it to consist of more components, like
in the old days -- I think patches will be gladly accepted, as long as
stability and performance won't suffer from them. Rambling about how Evo
is so full of it is easy, but in the end you can only vote with your
code.

Nils
-- 
     Nils Philippsen    /    Red Hat    /    nphilipp at redhat.com
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
 safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."     -- B. Franklin, 1759
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