Win32 binaries of Evolution
===========================

The evolution and evolution-data-server zipfiles contain "beta"
quality releases of Evolution and Evolution-Data-Server for
Windows. The zipfiles with a "-dev-" in the name are developer
packages and not needed to just run Evolution.

Running Evolution requires practially everything else here, in the
dependencies subfolder and in the
/pub/gnome/platform/2.14/2.14.0/win32 folder and its dependencies
subfolder. (Just running Evolution does not require the developer
packages. They are needed only when building software that uses the
corresponding GNOME libraries.)

Note that this version of Evolution is built against different builds
of the Mozilla NSS and NSPR libraries, with different DLL names. Thus
you can't use those Mozilla libraries that you used against earlier
builds of Evolution.

Unzip all necessary zipfiles in the same folder, let's call it
<prefix>. Add <prefix>\lib\evolution\2.6\components and <prefix>\bin
to your PATH. Run evolution-2.6.exe.

It might be a good idea to check the archives of the
evolution-win32-devel mailing list
http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?forum=evolution-win32-devel
for hints.

Usually I can be found on the #evolution channel on GimpNet.

There are some known problems:

- After quitting Evolution, the bonobo-activation-server and
evolution-data-server-1.6 processes stay around. In theory, it should
not be a problem that bonobo-activation-server and
evolution-data-server stay around. When you run evolution again it
should be able to contact the running instances. But for some reason
this doesn't work currently on Windows. This is presumably a
Win32-specific bug in bonobo that hasn't been debugged yet. So you
have to kill all of them manually after quitting evolution.

- There is bogus state left behind in the orbit-%USERNAME% and
gconfd-%USERNAME% folders in your temp folder, and in the .gconfd
folder in your HOME (Documents and Settings\%USERNAME% usually). This
is because of some other Win32-specific bug in ORBit2, bonobo or
something, then hasn't yet been fixed. It's best to clean out all
this, too, after quitting evolution before running it again. Otherwise
starting evolution the next time will be very slow as the bonobo or
ORBit2 layers try to connect to nonexistent listeners, or something.

- POP (and presumably IMAP) mailboxes using non-default port numbers
don't work. Evolution tries to create a folder for the mailbox that
has a colon in the name, which is not possible on Windows. This will
be fixed eventually.

A good idea would be to write a small .bat file (of VB script, or
whatever) that kills off any leftover processes mentioned, cleans the
state folders, and runs Evolution.

In case you want to redistribute Evolution and GNOME software
binaries, for instance in the form of an installer, please make sure
that you follow the license and make the corresponding sources
available from the same site. It it not enough to just point to
ftp.gnome.org and its mirrors.

--Tor Lillqvist [email protected]