[SyncEvolution] new SyncEvolution binaries, dropping features?

[Patrick Ohly]

[Most of the text below was written in December 2019, but than
unintentionally sent to an internal mailing list - no surprise that I
never got any response!]

Hello!

Over the Christmas holidays I worked on building a new SyncEvolution release. My
current goal is to build for Ubuntu Bionic (most
recent LTS) and support those binaries on all more recent Debian and
Ubuntu releases.

If possible, I'd like to drop unused features if they require extra
effort. This mostly depends if someone still needs them. Let me list
some features that I'd like to remove. If you still need them, please
respond here:

* At the top of that list is ActiveSync support. activesyncd no longer
  builds on Debian Stretch because it depends on libgnome-keyring, which
  was removed. It probably can be ported to libsecret, but that's
  extra work.

* x86 (i.e. 32 bit) binaries - it doubles the testing effort.

* RPMs - they never had proper dependencies and I am not sure whether
  they ever worked at all.

* Akonadi support and KDE in general.

  I first encountered problem with Akonadi in Debian Stretch and reported
  it here with a stand-alone reproducer:
  https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=369203

  But as pointed out in that issue, the API that SyncEvolution uses is no
  longer supported and thus SyncEvolution would have to be ported to the
  current API, whatever that is - I haven't investigated that.

* Port to Python 3 and stop supporting Python 2.

Regarding the source code, I'd like merge all pending patches. This
obviously includes all the changes that are required to build on more
recent Linux distros, but also the C++ modernization that I started a
while back.

The result will be more than just a simple bug fix release, but also not
something that has any new user-visible features. I'm not entirely happy
with that, but I also don't want to be stuck completely in pure
maintenance mode.

I got testing on the newer Linux distros working with the updated code
base already beginning of this year, but then got stuck because of a
regression and lack of time to dig into that. Since then, the apt repo
keys expired and I haven't renewed them because the binaries probably
wouldn't work anyway.

I suppose users would like to see binaries again, primarily because
SyncEvolution fell out of Debian/Ubuntu?

-- 
Best Regards

Patrick Ohly
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