A little clarification about evolution-data-server and tinymail.
About
Tinymail will not conflict, in any way, with evolution-data-server. The Camel in evolution-data-server is not, in any important technical way, “integrated” with the other components of evolution-data-server. If somebody once did integration with the Camel API part of evolution-data-server, exactly the same will still work with the embedded camel-lite of tinymail. That’s because the API has not changed (it’s true that some API has been added).
Tinymail also (by far) isn’t copying everything of evolution-data-server. It only contains the Camel part of it. And actually only those pieces of Camel that tinymail supports and uses (some providers have been disabled). It’s a size reduced one (and the size reductions are real). This means that tinymail users who don’t need other evolution-data-server components (and these users exist), are only using that exact specific part that is really used by tinymail.
One might think: then why isn’t Camel a separate library? From a technical point of view that is a very reasonable, sane and good question that I asked myself, too.
The camel-lite of tinymail has immensely changed. These changes are part of what tinymail is. Tinymail also depends on these changes. Not only did I change memory consumption, I also rewrote big parts the POP3 provider to support summaries and to make it possible to use it offline. I rewrote pieces of the IMAP code and I have recently added support for the condstore and binary capability. People are working on getting that upstream, indeed.
Getting it upstream
The speed at which these changes can go upstream is, however, not compatible with the speed at which the tinymail project is being developed. Although I’m trying to get as much upstream as possible, I also understand that some of the changes are very specific for mobile devices. It’s exactly those changes on which tinymail, naturally, depends the most.
API
The good part is that since only API was added, the only change that people who integrated with evolution-data-server using the Camel API have to make, is this one in their configure.ac:
- PKG_CHECK_MODULES(CML, camel camel-provider) + PKG_CHECK_MODULES(CML, camel-lite camel-lite-provider)
For mobile developers it’s also very easy to disable the camel part of evolution-data-server’s build environment. The building of Camel actually used to be disabled in the eds-dbus fork of evolution-data-server because not a single mobile application was using it nor was any of the other evolution-data-server components using it (and still isn’t as far as I know). The only thing you have to do is remove the word “camel” from the toplevel Makefile.am’s SUBDIRS variable. Although then you would have to make a small change to the tinymail build environment to compile tinymail, you could also copy the camel directory of tinymail’s camel-lite to that location.
A few weeks ago I wrote this official explanation on the subject.