Evolution is the integrated mail, calendar and address book suite from the Evolution Team. See http://www.gnome.org/projects/evolution for more information. If you are using Evolution, you may wish to subscribe to the Evolution users mailing list. If you are interested in contributing to development on it, you should certainly subscribe to the Evolution Hackers mailing list. Visit http://lists.ximian.com to subscribe or view archives of the Ximian mailing lists. If you are planning to work on any part of Evolution, please send mail to the mailing list first, to avoid duplicated effort (and to make sure that you aren't basing your work on interfaces that are expected to change). There is also a #evolution IRC channel on irc.gnome.org. Help for Evolution is available in the user manual (select "Help" from the menu after running the application), at the Novell knowledge base (http://support.novell.com), in the Evolution man page (run "man evolution" at the command line), and in the --help strings (run "evolution --help" at the command line). The rest of this file is dedicated to building Evolution. DEPENDENCIES ------------ In order to build Evolution you need to have the full set of GNOME 2.6 (or greater) development libraries installed. GNOME 2.6 or greater comes with most of the modern distributions, so in most cases it should be enough to just install all the devel packages from your distribution. Please make sure you have the most recent versions of the libraries installed, since bugs in the libraries can cause bugs in Evolution. Additional dependencies, besides the stock GNOME libraries (the dependencies should be compiled in the order they are listed here): * gnome-icon-theme 1.2.0 or later * ORBit 2.9.8 or later ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/sources/libsoup * libsoup 2.2.1 or later ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/sources/libsoup * evolution-data-server 1.1.1 or later ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/sources/evolution-data-server * gtkhtml 3.5.0 or later ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/sources/gtkhtml * [Optional] Mozilla NSPR/NSS libraries These are needed if you want to compile Evolution with SSL and S/MIME support. http://www.mozilla.org/ Many distributions ship these as Mozilla development packages. * [Optional] gnome-spell 1.0.1 or later This is only necessary if you want to have the spell checking functionality in Evolution's message composer. ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/sources/gnome-spell CONFIGURING EVOLUTION --------------------- First you have to decide whether you want to install Evolution (and its dependencies) into the same prefix as the rest of your GNOME install, or into a new prefix. Installing everything into the same prefix as the rest of your GNOME install will make it much easier to build and run programs, and easier to switch between using packages and building it yourself, but it may also make it harder to uninstall later. Also, it increases the chance that something goes wrong and your GNOME installation gets ruined. If you want to install in a different prefix, you need to do the following things: * Set the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable to contain a colon-separated list of all the pkg-config directories that will be involved in the build. This basically means a list of $prefix/lib/pkgconfig directory names, where $prefix is the prefix where a library is installed. For example, if you have GNOME installed in /usr and you are installing Evolution and its dependencies in /opt/evolution, you want to do something like the following (assuming you are using Bash): export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/lib/pkgconfig:/opt/evolution/lib/pkgconfig * Edit the bonobo-activation-config.xml file (which is normally found in /etc/bonobo-activation/) to include the location where you are installing Evolution. In the example given above (GNOME in /usr, Evolution and dependencies in /opt/evolution), your bonobo-activation-config.xml will have to look like this: /usr/lib/bonobo/servers /opt/evolution/lib/bonobo/servers * Pass an appropriate --prefix parameter to the configure scripts of Evolution and its dependencies, eg: ./configure --prefix=/opt/evolution More information on how to use the configure script is available in the INSTALL file which is part of the Evolution tarball. OPTIONAL FEATURES ----------------- Some optional features can be enabled at compilation time by passing appropriate flags to the configure script: * SSL support. Make sure you have Mozilla's NSS nad NSPR libraries installed and pass the following flag: --enable-nss