I've just spent two days debugging Evolution and the DBus data server. When I click on a contact in the Address Book wth the DBus backend, Evolution crashes in a very odd manner. Stack traces are a little odd, and Valgrind's output is just plain confusing. It can't be anything directly related to DBus as there is no IPC occuring at this point, and the memory management in the DBus port is if anything better than the Bonobo version. Eventually I figure out what is going on.

A few weeks ago a new field was added to EContact, to store the URI of the book the contact belongs too. This seems reasonable enough, just add the new item at the end of the enumeration and all is good. However, EContact does some magic for optimisation and the enumeration is sorted by type and the position of key items in the enumeration is stored, such as the location of the last simple string, or the location of the last list. This means that the new field was added as the third item in the enumeration...

Yes, really.

Also the library versioning wasn't changed, so older Evolution builds just carry on as normal. Now when an older Evolution asks the contact for the list of all email addresses, it expects to get a GList, which it promptly tries to iterate over. It was actually passed a structure representing the contact's full name, and when it tried to iterate over that as a list... all hell breaks loose.

I really hope this somehow gets sorted out before 2.12...

NP: Best Of, R.E.M. (the 90's Best Of, not the 2003 one)