I recently upgraded from Ubuntu Hardy to Ubuntu Intrepid. Most of my GNOME software worked well upon upgrade, there were even some improvements. However, a major piece of GNOME software that I use every single day and that is important to both my personal life and business stopped functioning correctly: Evolution.
>From 2.22 -> 2.24.3, Evolution redesigned its backend data store and unleashed this onto users as a "stable release" with disastrous effects. If you look at the evolution-list mailing list, you'll find lots of discontent. Basic things that existed in Evolution 2.22 -- basic features -- no longer work. For example: * Search folders or searches including "unread message" status does not work (regression) * Declaring a search folder of a search folder (vfolder of a vfolder) no longer works (regression). For me and many others on the list, this essentially meant that all of our vfolders stopped working altogether, meaning that we had to reorganize our mail in a different way. (regression) * Unread message counts are incorrect vis-a-vis the reality. For example, every time I send a message, my inbox's unread message count goes up by 1. This despite the fact that there are no unread messages there. Others report even larger divergences. (regression) * The "Unmatched" VFolder no longer exists. (regression) It turns out that these fixes still have no been committed even in Evo 2.26, released in March. Brian J. Murrell on the evolution-list has been indignant about this. Why am I contacting the GNOME release and marketing teams? Because I consider Evolution to be one of the core pieces of software that GNOME offers, and one that the release team should carefully watch when declaring new "stable" releases of GNOME. I think the fact that Evo was allowed to be released at this new version with so many regressions is really a sad state of affairs, and suggests that you need to reconsider your release process. Evo worked fine at 2.22, and I see very few improvements between 2.22 and 2.24, only regressions. That suggests that someone on the Evo team thought it was a good idea to "redesign the internals" without really committing to what that entailed -- releasing the redesigned version to a small "beta" community before declaring it to be the "stable version" released to thousands of production users and including in all major distributions as the latest and greatest STABLE software from GNOME. I don't know what can be done about it now, but this reflects very badly on GNOME for me. I'm a long-time GNOME user (~ 10 years), and in recent years as my computer has become more and more integral to my livelihood (as a small business owner and software engineer), I have become more and more hesitant about upgrading to the latest GNOME versions. That's why I was still running Ubuntu Hardy as of a week ago. At least it worked. I upgraded to Intrepid only because Jaunty is right around the corner, and I figured this would at least represent a "stable" snapshot of software. I guess I was wrong. What does it say when some of your most committed users (users who have hacking credentials -- I know C, GTK+, and GObject!) are hesitant to upgrade to your latest stable releases? Even worse, what does it say when their hesitancy is justified? I really want the best for GNOME and want to see this situation improve, but I don't think it will unless someone with serious credentials within GNOME takes a strong stand. Andrew -- marketing-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list
