Posted in 2011
State of the union, version 1.2
- 25 October 2011
With SyncEvolution 1.2 released and work on 1.3 under way it is a good time to take a small break and reflect on the state of the SyncEvolution project.
SyncEvolution 1.2 released
- 17 October 2011
The major new feature of the 1.2 release is support for non-SyncML protocols in general and CalDAV/CardDAV in particular. ActiveSync support is in development and will be in 1.3. These protocols are implemented as backends which are combined with other backends by SyncEvolution in a so called “local sync”. The GTK sync-ui does not yet support configuring non-SyncML protocols. See the [README.rst and man page](/documentation/syncevolution-usage) for more information on how to use the new feature via the command line.
SyncEvolution + non-recursive Automake
- 13 October 2011
Krzesimir Nowak [wrote about his work](http://krnowak.blogspot.com/2011/10/syncevolution-build-system-work.html) on converting SyncEvolution from an autotools project with recursive make to non-recursive make. Definitely worth a read for anyone interested in autotools. The current SyncEvolution master branch (post 1.2) uses that new build system. His conclusion is that the new system is not necessarily easier to understand than the one before (autotools with some preprocessing shell scripts). Partly that’s because SyncEvolution tries to achieve certain things not supported well by autotools (automatically generated version number, avoid listing all files explicitly, backends which can add to the global configure script), partly it is because non-recursive Automake introduces additional constraints (like having to avoid clobbering variables and rules). Helper scripts are still needed, the only difference is how they get called. Either way, what sold me on the idea of a non-recursive make is that on a machine with many cores, like the SyncEvolution nightly test server, compilation is considerably faster because parallel make can spawn more jobs in parallel. Recursive make often had to wait for the completion of compilation in a sub-directory. If memory serves me right, it was more than twice as fast.
SyncEvolution 1.1.99.7 released
- 16 September 2011
Mostly bug fixes again. Some are a bit more intrusive, thus another pre-release.
SyncEvolution 1.1.99.6 released
- 18 August 2011
Mostly bug fixes, some improvements in testing and packaging. This release was tested successfully with DAViCal 0.9.9.4.
SyncEvolution 1.1.99.5 "beyond SyncML" released
- 15 July 2011
Release 1.1.99.5 is the first release candidate for 1.2. It has gone through a long stabilization period and thus is suitable for normal users. The major new feature of the 1.2 release is support for non-SyncML protocols in general and CalDAV/CardDAV in particular. ActiveSync support is in development.
SyncEvolution for Debian: new maintainer needed
- 30 April 2011
David Bremner, the Debian packager of SyncEvolution, [announced](http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=624540) that he is looking for a new maintainer to take over that package. If you care about SyncEvolution in Debian and Ubuntu, then please consider taking over. On this occasion let me thank David Bremner for getting SyncEvolution into Debian and for maintaining it there.
The state of syncing in open source
- 15 April 2011
There have been two blog posts recently who point out that data synchronization using open source tools still doesn’t work as well as it should:
Comment spam
- 14 March 2011
Quite a bit of spam accumulated in the site comments. Usually I deleted spam comments within a few days after receiving the comment notification email, but not all spam comments triggered those, so I missed quite a lot. I went back and reviewed all comments and deleted as necessary, so the site should be cleaner now. If I missed anything, please let me know. In order to combat spam, all comments are now held for review before being posted. This will lead to delays, so we plan to improve the anti-spam measures and remove the need to review comments manually again. If someone wants to help maintain the site, such help would be highly appreciated! It takes away time that could be spent on improving the software instead…
Question for Sony Ericsson users: charset?
- 28 February 2011
A Sony Ericsson K800 user reported a problem with non-standard characters (German umlauts in his case). It turned out that the phone uses ISO-8859-1 instead UTF-8 as encoding, without announcing that. It is possible to configure the Synthesis engine so that it does with the character set conversion correctly, but that leads to this question: *which phones need this special treatment*? I’m currently inclined to enable this for all Sony Ericsson phones, unconditionally. If you are using a Sony Ericsson a) which uses something else than ISO-8859-1 as local charset and/or b) which works correctly with non-standard characters already in SyncEvolution 1.1.1, then please leave a comment.