Evolution does not allow editing email content on Wayland

[Marian Rainer-Harbach]

Impact
-------
The new/edit email dialog in Evolution crashes the app when it is closed.

Test Case
---------
Install the update
Open the Settings app. Click the About button at the bottom of the left sidebar (you may need to scroll down to see it). Verify that the Windowing System is Wayland.
Open Evolution.
Click the New Email button.
Add some text to the body section of the draft email.
The text should be visible.
Close the dialog.
Choose Discard.
The edit email window should close but Evolution should remain open.

Regression Potential
--------------------
One line fix to stop a really annoying crash by disabling hardware acceleration.

The webkitgtk and Ubuntu Desktop developers suspect that switching webkit2gtk to build with the wpebackend will avoid the invisible text and the crash (LP: #1964922), but it requires main inclusion for additional libraries. The main inclusion will be worked on over the next few months.

Original Bug Report
-------------------
This is very similar to bug #1966418, but only concerns the email edit window.

Before bug #1966418 was fixed, Evolution did not display email contents when running under Wayland. Starting Evolution with WEBKIT_DISABLE_COMPOSITING_MODE=1 worked around the issue.

Now that #1966418 is fixed, displaying email contents works again even without the workaround. However, it's still not possible to write/edit an email. The message area is greyed out and unresponsive.

When running under X or using the above workaround, editing emails works. So the issue seems to be the same as in #1966418, but for the edit window.

Workaround #1
-------------
Open a terminal and run this command:
WEBKIT_DISABLE_COMPOSITING_MODE=1 evolution

Workaround #2
-------------
Log out.
Select your name on the login screen.
Click the gear button and choose Ubuntu on Xorg.
Enter your password to finish logging in.

[Marian Rainer-Harbach (marianrh)]

Versions:
Evolution: 3.44.0-1
Mesa: 22.0.1-1ubuntu2

[Luis Alberto Pabón (copong)]

Same issue. Screenshot attached is a reply to an email.

Blank window happens with:
 * HTML
 * Plain text

Workaround: switch to any of the Markdown options when composing a message.

[Luis Alberto Pabón (copong)]

Ubuntu 22.04
Evolution 3.44.0-1
Sway 1.7

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

Hello Marian, or anyone else affected,

Accepted evolution into jammy-proposed. The package will build now and be available at https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/evolution/3.44.0-1ubuntu1 in a few hours, and then in the -proposed repository.

Please help us by testing this new package. See https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Testing/EnableProposed for documentation on how to enable and use -proposed. Your feedback will aid us getting this update out to other Ubuntu users.

If this package fixes the bug for you, please add a comment to this bug, mentioning the version of the package you tested, what testing has been performed on the package and change the tag from verification-needed-jammy to verification-done-jammy. If it does not fix the bug for you, please add a comment stating that, and change the tag to verification-failed-jammy. In either case, without details of your testing we will not be able to proceed.

Further information regarding the verification process can be found at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/QATeam/PerformingSRUVerification . Thank you in advance for helping!

N.B. The updated package will be released to -updates after the bug(s) fixed by this package have been verified and the package has been in -proposed for a minimum of 7 days.

[Ben. (benchti)]

I just upgrade today to Jammy and replying to an email (html or text) leave the text form empty then crashed evolution.

Version
DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu
DISTRIB_RELEASE=22.04
DISTRIB_CODENAME=jammy
evolution 3.44.0-1

I switch to -proposed and it fixes the problem for me

evolution 3.44.0-1ubuntu1

I will try to add the tag verification-done-jammy as request to this ticket

[Jeremy Bícha (jbicha)]

I installed evolution 3.44.0-1ubuntu1 and verified that I was able to use the New Email dialog without it crashing and with it showing my text on the default Ubuntu (on Wayland) session.

[Marian Rainer-Harbach (marianrh)]

I can confirm as well, thanks Jeremy :)!

[Luis Alberto Pabón (copong)]

I upgraded the following to 3.44.0-1ubuntu1 from jammy-proposed:

evolution evolution-common evolution-plugin-bogofilter evolution-plugin-pstimport evolution-plugins libevolution

I can also confirm I can compose messages and replies.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package evolution - 3.44.0-1ubuntu1

---------------
evolution (3.44.0-1ubuntu1) jammy; urgency=medium

  * Update Vcs fields
  * Cherry-pick patch to workaround unusable email editor with Wayland
    (LP: #1969584, #1964922)

 -- Jeremy Bicha <email address hidden> Thu, 21 Apr 2022 13:23:04 -0400

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

The verification of the Stable Release Update for evolution has completed successfully and the package is now being released to -updates. Subsequently, the Ubuntu Stable Release Updates Team is being unsubscribed and will not receive messages about this bug report. In the event that you encounter a regression using the package from -updates please report a new bug using ubuntu-bug and tag the bug report regression-update so we can easily find any regressions.