[plug] evolutions sucks - long live evolution

[Gavin Chester]

I've tried a few email clients over the years, but have liked the
feature set offered in evolution above all others.  Trouble is,
evolution continues to suck as the _least_ stable app I've ever run in
Linux :-(

For example, often when composing messages evo will freeze and no input
is possible.  In earlier versions, the cure was to go to a terminal and
execute 'killevo' or some such  (I forget the exact syntax).  Nowadays,
it's 'evolution --force-shutdown' in a terminal.  The saving grace was
that evo recognises that you've forced a shutdown and the 'lost' message
is recovered - mostly.  Of course, you can also always pick off all the
evo/bonobo component apps PID by PID, but that's tedious :-(

In case you were wondering whether this instability was specific to one
distro, I can tell you that it has been consistent over many evo
versions run over the years on RH8 then RH9 through FC2 to FC4.  It also
didn't matter whether I built it from source or upgraded via yum.  And,
now I see the same instability with Novell's customised evo version
running under OpenSuSE 10.1.  Grrr.   

But, despite all that I stick with it.  Why?  I don't think any other
client offers as many features.  Sigh.   But, tonight I saw the worst
case of any linux app going crazy that I have ever seen.  That is, I was
composing a message and evo froze - not once but twice in half an hour.
Trouble was, the second time it also froze the whole damn machine!!
That's right, it turned my linux PC into a windoze blue screen of death,
only the screen was grey!  I know it was evo because when it froze I
went to a different desktop and issued 'evolution --force-shutdown', but
all it said was 'segmentation fault'.  After doing this three times it
caused the lock up and I couldn't even open a virtual terminal.  Nada,
nothing finito :-(.  So much for having an up time of 8 days on the box
this time around.

You know the really perverse thing about all this? Even when I was
composing this whinge/rant evo froze on me again!  And, that was after
having to unplug this box to force a reboot.  All I can say is thank god
for journaling file systems :-O   

Gavin.