KDE-Pim meeting: Day 1
Yesterday I drove to Osnabrück. After checking in, I was just in time for the start of the meeting. After some small conversation we went to the restaurant, and had a good dinner. The dinner was sponsered by Intevation. Even if I wanted to spent money on this event, it is not possible ;-)
Today we kicked off with a demonstration by Thorsten Staerk, which showed us Krep. Krep is an interface around the GNU tool grep. It makes it really easy to find certain strings in a big text. You just get a window splitted in two parts. One part shows the text and in the other area you can enter multiple regex based expressions of items you want to find. It also works on streaming output, so you can actually redirect the debug output of your application to it, filter out what you want and see the lines you are interested in.
After that Jaroslaw Staniek gave a presentation on his Windows laptop about the current state of kdepim and his tools. Most of kdepim is working and we got a great presentation of it. He also showed us the Windows way of debugging and the possibilities of it. We were all so jalous….
Currently it’s Carnaval in Osnabrück, so even when we are on the third (or is it fourth?) floor, we hear a lot of noise from outside, there are many, many people out there, all starting to get drunk. It’s kind of amusing. We joined the crowd and went out for a small lunch at the “Subway”, just before we discussed the plans for 4.1.
That discussion was pretty short and on-topic. Till Adam joined the discussion with a video link. We agreed what we want to do and when. Basically for 4.1.0 the plan is to deliver a stable kdepim. Not based on Akonadi, but a complete port. After the release of 4.1.0 we can start porting the application piece-by-piece to Akonadi and hopefully present that for 4.2.0, but that’s almost a year away, so that’s difficult to plan at this point of time. It’s important to have the applications stable and provide the infrastructure/platform of Akonadi first. With that, it should be possible for Mailody to make a release somewhere during the 4.1.x cycle.
perfect, so entire KDE4 is now, and will be, useless for another 5 months, some people (me) simply need their emails, without them it is not a desktop enviorment, i’ll personally stick with 3.5 even through the rest of you did an impressive job on the KDE4, emails are must-have feature, and now the lack of an email client is the biggest obstacle of a serious adoption
The subject says it all. That’s currently what I’m using and I’m not experiencing any issues (save for a few, minor distro-specific problems).
Well, you might have a point, but the current situation is that the code is very complex to maintain. As I wrote in my previous blog, you can now write an email reader in 10 minutes. So, we get time to create features.
Another positive point is when someone writes an exchange resource, all akonadi enabled clients can actually use it. So to improve the current situation, we need to do this first.
Tom,
I did not interpreted that from the design of Akonadi; my stupidity ;-)
But if this is the case then Akonadi is indeed very cool. Now we only need someone to step up to write this Exchange thingy…
Keep up the good work and enjoy carnaval in Germany.
Harry
you are correct.
Tom,
Although I *love* KDE(4) the state of KDEPIM in general is somewhat worrying. For example, the company I work for is evaluating a transfer from Windows to Linux/KDE(3.5). I’m one of the testers, and while my OpenSUSE 10.3 with KDE 3.5.7 works perfectly I had to ‘fall back’ to using Evolution for mail. This has everything to do with our Exchange server of course.
Now, Akonadi is a great technology, but the be honest I think that what is missing is pure simple functionality in stead of a new back-end. In the end the integration with existing groupware (read Exchange) is so very important. It influences the decision makers big time! I know that there is a exchange plugin for KDEPIM, but is experimental, doesn’t work with the latest versions and… In evolution it all works. Just point it with a wizard to the Exchange server and it all works! Now, don’t get me wrong. I don’t like Evolution at all. But it is a *must* for a company like ours, and I know that there are many more out there with the same situation.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not trolling here. I really admire and respect all your hard work, but I’m just wandering if the current strategy is the right one…
Regards Harry
@Nescius
What’s stopping you then from using KDE-Pim 3.5 in a KDE4 session? A lot of work has gone into making both KDE 3.5 and KDE 4.0 co-installable. I wish people would stop being such drama queens all the time.
Tom said they are aiming for a complete kdepim port for KDE4.1. For me, this means KMail will be in KDE4.1, but won’t be based on Akonadi. Or did I miss something?
Cheers to Thorsten’s famous tool krep.
So he really found other people than me to show it to? ;-)
TBH I really like this tool and also I like all the work you KDEpim guys have done so far and I am really looking forward to KDE 4.1 with your pim applications on board.
Have fun in Osnabrück and keep up the good work!