Evolution

Evolution is the integrated mail, calendar and address book suite from
the Evolution Team.

See the Evolution Gnome Wiki page 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
there to subscribe or view archives of the Evolution 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 an #evolution IRC channel.

Help for Evolution is available in the user manual (select "Help" from
the menu after running the application), at the
GNOME users help site, 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 3
(or greater) development libraries installed.

GNOME 3 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):

• evolution-data-server of the same version as the Evolution is
• libsoup 2.42 or later
• WebKitGTK+ 2.16.0
• Mozilla NSPR/NSS libraries
  These are needed if you want to compile Evolution with SSL and S/MIME
  support. Many distributions ship these as Mozilla development packages.

Other dependencies are claimed during the configure phase. If these are
optional, also a parameter for the CMake configure to not use that dependency
is shown.

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 environment variables to contain a colon-separated list
  of all the directories that will be involved in the build.
  The environment variables are ACLOCAL_FLAGS, GSETTINGS_SCHEMA_DIR,
  LD_LIBRARY_PATH, PATH and PKG_CONFIG_PATH.

  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 ACLOCAL_FLAGS="-I /opt/evolution/share/aclocal"
  export GSETTINGS_SCHEMA_DIR="/opt/evolution/share/glib-2.0/schemas"
  export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/evolution/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
  export PATH=/opt/evolution/bin:$PATH
  export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/opt/evolution/lib/pkgconfig:$PKG_CONFIG_PATH
  

• Edit the D-Bus session-local.conf file (which is normally
  search for by D-Bus in /etc/dbus-1/) to include the
  location where you are installing Evolution.

  In the example given above (GNOME in /usr, Evolution and
  dependencies in /opt/evolution), your
  session-local.conf will have to look like this:

  <!DOCTYPE busconfig PUBLIC
        "-//freedesktop//DTD D-BUS Bus Configuration 1.0//EN"
        "http://www.freedesktop.org/standards/dbus/1.0/busconfig.dtd">
  <busconfig>
        <!-- Search for .service files in /usr/local -->
        <servicedir>/opt/evolution/share/dbus-1/services</servicedir>
  </busconfig>
  

• Pass an appropriate CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX parameter to the configure
  scripts of Evolution and its dependencies, eg:

  cd ..../sources/evolution
  mkdir build
  cd build
  cmake -G "Unix Makefiles" \
        -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/opt/evolution \
        -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release \
        ..
  

• Run cmake --help to get list of available generators (the -G argument)
  on your platform.

OPTIONAL FEATURES

Some optional features can be enabled at compilation time by passing
appropriate flags to the CMake. These options are shown at the end
of the successful configure phase.

BUILDING EVOLUTION

After the Evolution is properly configured, run:

make -j
make -j install

to build it.

ONLINE BUILD MANUAL

An online build manual is also available.