Bug 144629 – gnome-extra/evolution-brutus-1.1.6 - Brutus Exchange connector for Evolution 2.4 and later

• Product: Gentoo Linux
• Status: RESOLVED OBSOLETE

[Description Jules Colding 2006-08-21 05:36:36 UTC]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.8.0.5) Gecko/20060801 Firefox/1.5.0.5
Build Identifier: 

I hereby wish to submit an ebuild for evolution-brutus (e-b). 

What is evolution-brutus?
------------------------

e-b is an alternative to evolution-exchange and will work toward Microsoft
Exchange 5.5, 2000, 2003 or 2007. Evolution 2.4 and 2.6 are equally supported by
e-b.

e-b provides access to Extended MAPI and therefore to Exchange 5.5 or later. The
access is provided by a Brutus server, which is a proxy translating MAPI request
to/from corresponding CORBA requests. Brutus is distributed under GPLv2 or later.

The core technology behind Brutus and e-b is therefore a large set of
appropriately defined IDL constants, types and interfaces. The Brutus server
dynamically instantiates MAPI-wrapping CORBA objects on behalf of clients.


And the difference to evolution-exchange is?
--------------------------------------------

e-b is totally different from the well-known evolution-exchange
component by not using WebDAV but CORBA and a mediating proxy server.
Both approaches has advantages and drawbacks and I will definitely *not*
venture into some flame war as to which is "best". 

That being said, I think it would be beneficial for the average
developer to have a rough, but hopefully balanced, idea of the main
functional differences:

1) WebDAV can be used to connect to Exchange 2000 and above. Exchange
5.5 is very poorly supported and not supported at all in
evolution-exchange.

2) evolution-exchange does not require any software installations on the
Windows side to be functional as long as IIS is running and support is
enabled in Exchange.

3) e-b requires the Brutus server to be installed on some Windows server
with the correct version of MAPI. e-b should not be installed on the
Exchange server itself, but you can if you will.

4) e-b does not require you to enable IIS/WebDAV. e-b can connect Brutus
clients to Exchange without any changes to most Exchange configurations.
As a rule of thumb - if Outlook works, so will e-b.

5) All MAPI properties are supported by Brutus, including PT_OBJECT ones
as well as MAPI notifications.


Status:
-------

e-b is fully functional and supports Exchange email, tasks and calendaring. e-b
has been tested on Fedora Core and Gentoo. You can always get the latest source
and binaries here:

http://www.omesc.com/content/downloads/index.php

I will add the ebuild as an attachment to this bugzilla entry.

Reproducible: Always

[Comment 1 Jules Colding 2006-08-21 05:37:35 UTC]

Created attachment 94765 [details]
ebuild for evolution-brutus-1.1.6

This is the ebuild file for e-b.

[Comment 2 Jules Colding 2007-05-12 14:47:33 UTC]

Created attachment 119016 [details]
Updated ebuild file

I haven't maintained this bugzilla entry as much as the actual e-b source, but I feel that now is the time that I should upload a recent ebuild file. 

Anyone interested in taking a look at this?

[Comment 3 Mart Raudsepp 2007-09-24 17:37:27 UTC]

It's quite hard to do anything about this without having access to an exchange server, which is quite the case for all gnome-office herd members, for example

[Comment 4 Jules Colding 2007-09-24 20:20:06 UTC]

I think your comment was cut short. but yes - an Exchange server is a requisite as e-b is an Exchange connector just as e-e. But, I'm willing to give ssh access to my environment if someone from the gnome-office herd members wants it.  

[Comment 5 Mart Raudsepp 2007-09-24 20:53:31 UTC]

No, it wasn't cut short.
Anyhow, the thing is that we don't have any access to an exchange server whatsoever, so even evolution-exchange version bumping and fixing goes based on hope and if that fails, then user reports.
So if you can help us out in this regards, then that'd be great, but at this point I'm not even sure what is necessary to be able to test these things.
Meanwhile I'll CC gnome-office, as I'm quite time deprived myself right now

[Comment 6 Jules Colding 2007-09-24 21:42:59 UTC]

(In reply to comment #5)
> No, it wasn't cut short.

The missing punctuation mark confused me :-)


> Anyhow, the thing is that we don't have any access to an exchange server
> whatsoever, so even evolution-exchange version bumping and fixing goes based on
> hope and if that fails, then user reports.
> So if you can help us out in this regards, then that'd be great, but at this
> point I'm not even sure what is necessary to be able to test these things.
> Meanwhile I'll CC gnome-office, as I'm quite time deprived myself right now

OK. What I can offer is ssh access to a somewhat big box with a few vmware images running more or less constantly. One of these images is an Exchange 5.5 server. I use this setup to test e-b myself. It would also be possible to setup a newer Exchange box if you want to test e-e, but not until after November 1.

You just say the word.

HTH,
  jules

[Comment 7 Jules Colding 2007-09-25 08:39:42 UTC]

New download location: <http://www.omesc.com/node/23>

[Comment 8 Jules Colding 2007-09-26 12:04:44 UTC]

Created attachment 131930 [details]
Updated ebuild file

Too many bugs fixes and feature enhancements to mention.

[Comment 9 Jules Colding 2007-10-18 12:27:16 UTC]

(In reply to comment #6)
> > Anyhow, the thing is that we don't have any access to an exchange server
> > whatsoever, so even evolution-exchange version bumping and fixing goes based on
> > hope and if that fails, then user reports.
> > So if you can help us out in this regards, then that'd be great, but at this
> > point I'm not even sure what is necessary to be able to test these things.
> > Meanwhile I'll CC gnome-office, as I'm quite time deprived myself right now
> 
> OK. What I can offer is ssh access to a somewhat big box with a few vmware
> images running more or less constantly. One of these images is an Exchange 5.5
> server. I use this setup to test e-b myself. It would also be possible to setup
> a newer Exchange box if you want to test e-e, but not until after November 1.
> 
> You just say the word.

There is now an Exchange 2003 server up and running that the gnome-office team may use for testing if they want.

[Comment 10 Daniel Gryniewicz (RETIRED) 2007-10-22 18:27:15 UTC]

Sweet, thanks.  I'd like to take you up on that.  Can you email me with information?

I lost my exchange access over a year ago, and I was the last one with exchange access on the gnome-office team...

After I get exchange support up, I'll look into adding e-b (assuming I can get it to work better than last time I tried it... :P )

[Comment 11 Jules Colding 2007-10-23 06:52:52 UTC]

(In reply to comment #10)
> Sweet, thanks.  I'd like to take you up on that.  Can you email me with
> information?

Sure. I'll send an email in private.

> I lost my exchange access over a year ago, and I was the last one with exchange
> access on the gnome-office team...
> 
> After I get exchange support up, I'll look into adding e-b (assuming I can get
> it to work better than last time I tried it... :P )

Yes, let's hope that ;-)

[Comment 12 Jeremiah Nolte 2008-04-12 17:35:26 UTC]

Created attachment 149489 [details]
Updated ebuild file

Updated to newest version (1.2.11), updated and separated DEPEND and RDEPEND, and included fix for latest ImageMagick version header paths.  Also, www.omesc.com is now wwww.42tools.com.

This is my first ebuild post...hopefully I didn't do anything too wrong.

[Comment 13 Jules Colding 2008-04-12 21:19:28 UTC]

I'll test it on Monday and will put an updated tarball/release in:

http://www.42tools.com/sites/default/files/downloads/dist/evolution-brutus/Gentoo/

Thanks

[Comment 14 Dirk Heinrichs 2008-04-16 12:49:35 UTC]

Now this one (1.2.11) fails, again because of -Werror, I guess.

 i686-pc-linux-gnu-gcc -DHAVE_CONFIG_H -I. -I.. -DLIBEXECDIR=\"/usr/libexec\" -I/usr/include/orbit-2.0 -I/usr/include/glib-2.0 -I/usr/include/evolution-data-server-2.22 -I/gentoo/build/mail-client-evolution-brutus-1.2.11/work/evolution-brutus-1.2.11/idl_output -I/gentoo/build/mail-client-evolution-brutus-1.2.11/work/evolution-brutus-1.2.11 -DORBIT2=1 -pthread -D_REENTRANT -I/usr/include/evolution-data-server-2.22 -I/usr/include/libgnome-2.0 -I/usr/include/libbonobo-2.0 -I/usr/include/gnome-vfs-2.0 -I/usr/lib/gnome-vfs-2.0/include -I/usr/include/orbit-2.0 -I/usr/include/gconf/2 -I/usr/include/glib-2.0 -I/usr/lib/glib-2.0/include -I/usr/include/bonobo-activation-2.0 -I/usr/include/libxml2 -I/usr/include/gtk-2.0 -I/usr/include/libglade-2.0 -I/usr/lib/gtk-2.0/include -I/usr/include/atk-1.0 -I/usr/include/cairo -I/usr/include/pango-1.0 -I/usr/include/freetype2 -I/usr/include/directfb -I/usr/include/libpng12 -I/usr/include/pixman-1 -L/usr/lib -lfreetype -lz -I/usr/include/ImageMagick -DORBIT2_EXTENSIONS -I/usr/include/brutus-keyring-1.0 -D_REENTRANT -DORBIT2=1 -pthread -I/usr/include/gtk-2.0 -I/usr/lib/gtk-2.0/include -I/usr/include/atk-1.0 -I/usr/include/cairo -I/usr/include/pango-1.0 -I/usr/include/glib-2.0 -I/usr/lib/glib-2.0/include -I/usr/include/freetype2 -I/usr/include/directfb -I/usr/include/libpng12 -I/usr/include/pixman-1 -I/usr/include/orbit-2.0 -I/usr/include/libIDL-2.0 -Wall -Wmissing-prototypes -Wnested-externs -Wpointer-arith -Wno-sign-compare -O2 -march=pentium4 -fomit-frame-pointer -pipe -Werror -Werror-implicit-function-declaration -Wundef -Wbad-function-cast -Wcast-align -Wmissing-declarations -std=gnu89 -D_REENTRANT -MT brutus_debug.lo -MD -MP -MF .deps/brutus_debug.Tpo -c brutus_debug.c  -fPIC -DPIC -o .libs/brutus_debug.o
In file included from /usr/include/evolution-data-server-2.22/libecal/e-cal-component.h:28,
                 from /usr/include/evolution-data-server-2.22/libecal/e-cal-recur.h:27,
                 from /usr/include/evolution-data-server-2.22/libecal/e-cal.h:29,
                 from ../server/brutus_util.h:27,
                 from brutus_debug.c:37:
/usr/include/evolution-data-server-2.22/libical/ical.h:30:2: error: #warning "Please ensure that the memory returned by the functions mentioned at http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=516408#c1 are free'ed"
In file included from /usr/include/evolution-data-server-2.22/libecal/e-cal-util.h:25,
                 from /usr/include/evolution-data-server-2.22/libecal/e-cal.h:30,
                 from ../server/brutus_util.h:27,
                 from brutus_debug.c:37:
/usr/include/evolution-data-server-2.22/libical/ical.h:30:2: error: #warning "Please ensure that the memory returned by the functions mentioned at http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=516408#c1 are free'ed"
make[2]: *** [brutus_debug.lo] Error 1
make[2]: Leaving directory `/gentoo/build/mail-client-evolution-brutus-1.2.11/work/evolution-brutus-1.2.11/server'


BTW: Did I get this right: One needs to install Brutus Server on a Windows machine for making this work?

[Comment 15 Jules Colding 2008-04-16 14:26:51 UTC]

(In reply to comment #14)
> 
> /usr/include/evolution-data-server-2.22/libical/ical.h:30:2: error: #warning
> "Please ensure that the memory returned by the functions mentioned at
> http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=516408#c1 are free'ed"
> make[2]: *** [brutus_debug.lo] Error 1
> make[2]: Leaving directory

All of the above is fixed in svn. I haven't yet had the time to fullfil my promise above. I'l do a new release tomorrow.


> BTW: Did I get this right: One needs to install Brutus Server on a Windows
> machine for making this work?

e-b connects to Brutus Server which then does the Exchange communication. So yes, you need Brutus Server on some Windows box for this to do any good.

[Comment 16 Dustin Polke 2009-09-07 08:58:35 UTC]

Unfortunately, the TAR ball is not fetchable... Anyone knows where to get or can provide one?

BR,
Dustin

[Comment 17 Linear Systems Tech Svcs. 2010-07-22 17:32:17 UTC]

Well,

As an update to this ongoing issue, I found a tarball for version 1.2.35 from a Russian website; http://soft.mydiv.net/lin/cname14/cname19/ which purportedly supports Gnome 2.26.  Of course, now to find and/or make an ebuild for it...

Now, I also saw somewhere that the xdata connector/plugin/add-on is working now for connecting Mozilla's Lightning to an Exchange server.  If you have no problems with running Thunderbird on your system, you may want to look at adding xdata and see if that works for you.