[libreoffice-marketing] What's New in Evolution 3.6

Hi :)
There has been some discussion on the Users List about email clients.  It seems LibreOffice is 
compatible with quite a few and people might be interested to hear about a new release of one of 
the larger ones.  Larger and more like a drop-in replacement for MS Outlook.  It's not a new 
project but it's still developing quite fast.  

Regards from
Tom :)  





> ________________________________
> From: Matthew Barnes <hidden>
> To: evolution-list@gnome.org 
> Sent: Wednesday, 19 September 2012, 15:13
> Subject: [Evolution] What's New in Evolution 3.6
>
> I've never been very good about posting release announcements, but
> Evolution 3.6.0 is set to be released next week and it's a pretty big
> release for us.  I just wanted to highlight a couple major changes so
> you know what to expect.
>
>
> Hello, WebKit!
> --------------
>
> We're in the process of abandoning our ancient HTML renderer (GtkHtml)
> for WebKit/GTK+.  We're spreading this across two releases just because
> it's such a large workload.  Dan Vrátil did most of the WebKit porting
> and he's an absolute superhero for doing so.
>
> Evolution 3.6 will render received mail using WebKit/GTK+.  That means
> HTML mails containing CSS will finally be displayed correctly, since our
> old HTML renderer had no CSS support.
>
> The email composer in Evolution 3.6 will still use GtkHtml, but Dan
> already has a branch ready to merge which ports the composer to WebKit,
> so we'll spend the entire 3.7 development cycle testing that and shaking
> out the bugs in time for Evolution 3.8 next spring.
>
>
> Goodbye GConf!
> --------------
>
> Evolution mostly moved from GConf to dconf (aka GSettings) in 3.4, but
> account settings were still kept in GConf in those nasty XML blobs that
> everyone hates, including myself.  This is because I was taking my sweet
> time to finish a complete overhaul of our account storage format, which
> I had actually started all the way back in the GNOME 2.32 era.
>
> Evolution 3.6 will move your account data to plain text files which live
> in $HOME/.config/evolution/sources.  Evolution-Data-Server 3.6 will also
> introduce a new D-Bus service which will serve these files to Evolution,
> GNOME Contacts, GNOME Shell and any other E-D-S client, and also handle
> various other miscellaneous chores like talking to GNOME Online Accounts
> and cleaning up old data after you delete an account.
>
> WARNING: Because our data migration is always one-way only (forward),
>          and because Evolution 3.4 does not know the new account storage
>          format or the new storage location in 3.6, downgrading from 3.6
>          back to 3.4 is going to be problematic.
>
>          Similar to when we moved files from $HOME/.evolution to the
>          standard XDG base directories back in 2.32, downgrading from
>          3.6 won't technically lose your account settings, but older
>          versions won't be able to find them.  So be aware of this.
>
>
> Smaller Development Team
> ------------------------
>
> And now for some sad news.  Since Evolution 3.4 was released we've had a
> significant reduction in our development team.  SUSE decided to cut all
> funding of Evolution development and reassigned its (formerly Novell)
> Evolution developers elsewhere.
>
> That leaves just myself, Milan Crha and Dan Vrátil (all Red Hatters).
> However Dan is in the process transitioning over to Red Hat's KDE team,
> leaving myself and Milan as the only remaining full time developers for
> the moment.
>
> Red Hat does have an open position in the Brno, Czech Republic office
> for a new full-time Evolution developer [1], if anyone is interested.
>
> Unfortunately this staff reduction caused a few software causalities:
>
> * Evolution-GroupWise is now unmaintained and will not see a 3.6
>   release.  The SUSE team had been maintaining this prior to their
>   reassignment, and unfortunately we just don't have adequate resources
>   to keep it going.  If anyone would like to take over maintainership,
>   I'd be happy to assist with getting the module back up to speed.
>
> * Evolution-Exchange is also cut for the same reasons.  That's the old
>   Ximian Connector, which talks to Exchange 2003 via Outlook Web Access
>   but doesn't work with Exchange 2007 or later.
>
>   For Exchange integration, most of our development focus is now on the
>   Exchange Web Services module (Evolution-EWS), but Evolution-MAPI is
>   still being maintained since it works with Exchange 2003 as well as
>   2007 and 2010.
>
>   With only two full-time developers left, we just felt that maintaining
>   three different Microsoft Exchange backends was getting ridiculous and
>   was not the best use of our time.
>
> No worries though, we will soldier on.
>
> Matthew Barnes
>
>
> [1] 
> http://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2012/09/13/interested-in-joining-the-red-hat-desktop-team-here-in-brno/
>
>
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