DrunkenBlog

This one's long

...because I'm still really, really pissed. I'm just not sure at who or what yet, and it's all such a blur of wasted time & productivity.

I've been trying in vain to get Evolution working on OSX on top of gnome using Apple's X11, using fink, for more than a week and I'm better now about learning when a side project has taken on a life of its own and its time to throw in the towel.

It started because I've become somewhat enamored of Ximian's Evolution on my linux boxes. Bigtime. What is Evolution? It's an integrated mail/calendar/notes client, compatible with Microsofts Exchange Server if you buy the connector. If you're using OSX, think Entourage but without any of the stability, speed, or database corruption problems. If you're using windows, think Outlook but without any of the virus/worm/exploit problems.

It's not perfect, but any squibbles I have with it would be in small areas. Nothing major, and most of those would be tied to the platform evolution runs on more than anything. The interface is standard enough that just about anyone can jump into using it without any hassles. I gotta give it mad props, and have found myself using it more and more. And even, dare I say it, slipping into trusting-it-to-work-without-thinking-about-it-mode.

Enter MacOS 10.3. In contrast to Evolution, Apple really has four base offerings:

• Apples Mail + iCal
  I'm not a big fan of Apples mail client. Some are. I just had too many problems with it to slip into trust-it mode, although 10.3 is a lot better in regards to things like attachments and not being able to tell it to insert my damn cursor after the text I quote, not above it. But for a lot of users, 10.3 Mail is just fine and even good. But iCal? iCal is a blight on Apples software offerings. It's just really, really bad. Double-whammy bad, in that both the UI & the performance just suck. I can't help but imagine the project meeting: "We sorta gotta have something in this space, but we don't want to devote more than one developer more than 1 month out of the year, and we don't really have developers who use calendaring apps so you, yes you, lowly coding applescript intern, are being asked to throw together a calendar package after you spend a month learning to write cocoa apps." It's that poorly implemented. Not to bash the original coder or team, as apps this incomplete generally don't get released if the programmer has anything to say about it.
• Microsofts Entourage
  I actually own this one, as I own Office X, and I don't use Entourage. Trust me, considering that I paid $500 for the office suite, I'd like to if for no other reason than to maximize my investment... but it's out of the running. Which is sad, because it has the best interface & functionality out of all of them. Performance is lackluster to say the least, but that can be dealt with. The killer is their decrepit database format which is prone to corruption. Its not uncommon to want/need to be able to store all your mail/notes/calendar in a single database. Its possible to not do that and have the same functionality via different ways, but the single database can be forgiven. What can't be forgiven is that the database is extremely prone to corruption. Extremely prone to corruption. MS reps (or MVPs) on lists think its normal to have to rebuild your database every week or risk losing everything. Uncool.
• 3rd party mail app + iCal
  I happen to use Gyazmail (for now, although I'm getting worried about it, but I have decent chunks of time invested) for my mail on OSX, so no worries there. Others could use Eudora, etc. But again, iCal is just a POS and doesn't deserve to be used as it just encourages Apple to think they can release anything and get away with it.
• 3rd party mail app + Now Up-To-Date & Contact
  I just could never get into Now Up-To-Date. I didn't mind it too much under OS9, but they don't seem to have made the transition to OSX very well. I had real stability problems when I was checking it out, and the interface is extremely long in the tooth. And at $129, the damn thing better give me a bath while its telling me about my schedule. It doesn't give baths. I called and made sure.

I actually gave up on all of those, and all the staggeringly bad shareware that might fill the pinch (question: wtf about making a to-do-list or calendaring app makes it so difficult for mac shareware authors?) and am using a browser-based solution: phpgroupware. It's the best I can do for right now, even though its not really what I was looking for. It does the job, and its not too much of an ordeal to have mysql & a browser running.

So, at any rate, since my calendaring solution is a bit of a hack, I figured it wouldn't be too bad if I was forced to use X11 in order to use Evolution under OSX. Or at least I got antsy to see if it would feel doable, and considering I had fink and everything I thought that would be needed, figured I'd give it a shot. I failed, miserably, and was really looking forward to at least being able to say I had Evolution running on Darwin.

It started out alright. I'm running fink 6.2 & a fairly fresh 10.3 install. Fink is working well, I use it for pulling in some *nix games I'm partial to (you can see one of them by clicking the image at top right), as well as mysql, lynx, gnome, mozilla & some other stuff.

And just as a quick primer to anyone who cares, fink is a debian-style tool for installing/compiling *nix tools and their dependancies. If there is a binary package available of what you're after it'll download it & install it. If there's only source, it will look at what the application depends on for operation and download and compile that also. It runs in a cli terminal, but there is an add-on GUI-based controller for it.

The alternative would be trying to compile some software, and getting an error that it needs your system to also have some library. So you go get that and try to install it, and then find out it also is dependent on something else. *wash, rinse, repeat* In short, fink is hardcore-cool for this sorta thing. So I browsed fink for an Evolution package, no dice, but the source was listed as available in the unstable tree when I browsed their site. Woo hoo!

I'd only pulled one thing from fink unstable before (hfstar) and that went well, as it's generally just called unstable because the packages haven't been tested as rigorously as the stable branch... but by and large its not that big of a deal. You can pull stuff manually in from unstable, change some headers, compile them yourself, put them where they need to go, & you're good to go. It can be a bit of a drag tho for larger projects: pulling in the source via cvs, moving files around, remembering what you did for next time, etc.

Conundrum. Evolution only has source in the unstable tree, and I wasn't really looking forward to dealing with pulling in the source via CVS & such, and the unstable tree had the added appeal of being able to do a simple:

$ sudo fink update-all

...to bring everything up to date via rsync, including things like hfstar which I'd had to install manually. Butter. Add a couple of lines to fink.conf to tell it to check the unstable main & unstable crypto trees, tell it to update its listings, and I should be gold. I go for it:

$ sudo fink selfupdate

Holy hell, I should have paid attention to whatever it asked. I thought I had told it to just download the listings for the unstable trees after editing the fink.conf file to tell it where else to look. Do to the hours & hours it spent downloading, I was actually worried I'd told it to download the entire unstable tree and start building or something. After a double check, things were fine, it was just gonna take a lot longer than I expected.

Come back, and everything seems to be gold. Do check, and sure enough, hfstar is showing up as available in the experimental tree, so I decided that was a good test case. Installed fine. Butter. Time to get a bit more adventurous. I saw that there was an updated gnome in the experimental tree. I saw that there was a KDE binary, and I've never had that running on OSX. Tempting, but no, gnome is a known variable right now and plus I'd like to check out gnome-office. So what the hell, if things go really bad I can always remove it and just do a:

$ sudo fink apt-get install bundle-gnome

...or use apt-get & I'll be right back to where I was. Since I was using binaries the first time around, I had a very skewed impression of how long this was going to take. I've built gnome on an x86 box before, and I know it didn't take this damn long. I can't imagine how long it would have taken using gcc 2.95, considering Apple made some big progress on compile times in the more recent version. Kudos for that, Apple. But keep them coming. A lot of them. This just took way longer than it should have.

But wait! Problem. I get the error message to the right, warning me that I have an existing X11 installation, that I should remove it, or install one of the options in fink. Not good, considering I've never installed one and just been using Apples X11, and I thought fink 6.2 was supposed to auto-detect it. I was pretty sure #3 was safe, and would just make a pointer to Apples install, but it wasn't sitting right. I don't like making decisions without information. So I canceled out, and turned to google.

It turns out you get that message if you didn't install the X11 SDK on the developer CD. I was positive I had. More googling. Turns out, the installer can bork and doesn't put things where it should be, and sometimes needs multiple installs. I had a direction, at least.

Reinstalled the X11 SDK. Tried to build, which went a lot faster, as it didn't just restart the process, just checked its progress and tried again. Yay for that, but no luck. Reinstalled X11 SDK for a 3rd time, on a lark, even though I really didn't think it'd do it, but sure enough it starts chugging along. I then get asked a question I'm not of the answer to: what uri-pm do I want to use? Egh. A google shows I want ur-pm581 for panther. No sweat.

It worked! At this point I was sorta kicking myself for not comparing the before & after /usr/X11R6/ directories to see what had magically changed to cause fink to recognize it, but my mind just wasn't there, as I had other things going on and you kinda lose the details when jumping between mental thoughts, especially when a box is just doing a damn install. Changed my .xinitrc file to reflect the some of the new stuff in gnome, and sure enough its up and running. Lots faster, prettier fontage... butter. I'm feeling better. Accomplished, even.

My eye turns back to KDE (it's a cool desktop) but no, must remain focused. Metacity goes in smooth. The euphoria of the last two experiences is already blotting out just how annoyed I was getting earlier. I'm figuring Evolution is next up, and shouldn't be too hard, right? Do the command, jelly through the install questions... all pretty standard, wanting to know whether or not to use crypto vs plain packages, etc. Except for one of the last ones, asking about python.

That one through me, and I was back to google time, except I didn't have a net connection and wouldn't' for awhile. So it all goes to the back-burner. I'm unamused. But really, I suppose I could have searched for everything related to installing Evolution on MacOS Punter before I got started... bygones. So I just suspended the session and put things on hold until I could get online to check it out, which was a good day.

Day and some extra later, I find my answer about the python question, and everything is going good, if hazy. Might as well just set it running while I'm asleep, and check it out the next day, so I give it the go-ahead, set the terminal to unlimited buffer so I can see what's gone on, and join the bed. The next morning, I come in to see parts of this:

And yes, check out the scroll bar on the right. Craziness. It showed me the dependancies, which I should have paid much, much, much better attention to. They are large. Mozilla? What the hell? Mozilla is a huge compile by itself, let alone everything else it needs. I already have Mozilla in my /sw tree, and yes I saw that it needed Mozilla, but assumed it would reference my install. Stupid assumption, but it was really late.

I had to suspend and resume this (control-z + fg, I love you) prolly 8 times over the course of the next two days, because I had other things I needed to use my computer for, and it would be a little odd to explain that I was building some software in the background while I was giving a power point presentation.

Still, its just a huge compile, so not much you can do except wish there had been a binary and wish that gcc was faster for PPC. So, a few days after I started I woke up in the morning to find another error.

Sigh. It's a "librep"dependancy error. Never seen that one before, so I note it, and head back to google a few hours later when I had the time. Sao's excellent fink faqs helped me find the answer to this one. It said it was due to me installing Open Office, which could have some truth to it although I never remember doing such. The fix worked, tho, so I restart the build.

Again, still taking forever and a day. At this point I'm starting to wish I'd figured out a way to do it through Apple's Xcode, so I could distribute the build among my machines. Or just done it on a machine 5 times as fast, except they don't make a laptop 5 times faster. :( So I'm just gonna have to deal.

Finally, a day later and after leaving it to do its thing while I was sleeping, I wake up to this:

Failed: Problem resolving dependencies. Check for circular dependencies.

Seriously unamused by this point. I know what a circular dependancy is, but not a clue in hell as to how I'm going to set about trying to resolve it. A google shows that it may be a bug in fink, which can be worked around by building everything manually, in order.

No chance in hell am I going there. I know when I've reached the edge of the cliff on my skillset, and am starting to dangle over the edge. I do know its possible, it unfortunately just doesn't seem possible for me. I hate that. And unfortunately, 90% of the stuff above is prolly out of order due to the haze of the last week, and the fact that I wrote it all down in a rant after the fact.

Moral of the story?

There is no damn moral to the story. I'm just annoyed. And, as it stands, have no Evolution on OSX. I give up for now.

 Posted by drunkenbatman
    March 06, 2004, at 05:03 PM