I had to enter my full name, email address and other pieces of personal information in quite a few setup wizards by now (gaim, evolution, gnome-meeting, probably some more). That sucks, they should all share their information. Isn't evolution-data-server supposed to provide this ?
Not really a YellowPad bug
We could prepopulate some of the input fields from GECOS/LDAP and other places to streamline the configuration process. There's also a feature request upstream in e-d-s/evo to have a "me" contact, though I can't find it right now. Moving to FC5 tracker
Old thread about this: http://lists.ximian.com/archives/public/evolution-hackers/2004-February/002909.html gnome-about-me in control-center package goes some way towards this.
gnome-about-me uses e_book_get_self to locate the "self" contact and book; this is implemented in e-d-s's libebook by storing it in GConf in /apps/evolution/addressbook/self/self_uid So we at least have an API for this. Need to go through the various apps and have them call e_book_get_self and grab initialization data accordingly, and if it's not there, (offer to?) upload the data to e-d-s so it will be for the next app.
gnome-about-me does a few other tricks, like writing to gecos for the fields that are supported there (some overlap between the two), and writing the image to ~/.face so that it gets picked up by gdm.
These tricks probably ought to be moved into libebook so that there's a consistent API, and so that when you edit yourself in Evolution's contacts component it updates those other data stores.
I've filed this upstream here: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=326899