Akonadi meeting, here I come && Mailody is dead.
Today (well, yesterday now), I’m traveling to Berlin again. I’ve now been there a dozen times or so and I’m getting the hang of traveling to it. I had a little argument with a passenger about who should sit where. Not that I care much were I sit, ah well, I actually did care, my reserved seat was next to the window and hat a power socket, so you definitely want to claim it. Sorry dude.
In Berlin there is the Akonadi meeting again. We do it twice a year and that seems to be a good interval. Just before each freeze (well, in this case, slightly after). Ah freeze, that reminds me of a) the temperature inside this cabin and b) the silence which arrived after the small argument… Back to topic. I’ve not hacked much the last couple of months, work work gets in the way sometimes. The spare time I had, I spent mostly on sysadmin tasks, of which Eike Hein is now doing most.
The Akonadi team has a few problems, or challenges if you like. Not really technical, but rather on the marketing side of stuff. I think the last couple of months have shown that we are not really communicating a lot with ‘the outside’, and in the days before this meeting, I’ve heard a lot of questions about the current state of KMail and other Akonadi apps. As with each meeting, I again hope to have time to report from the meeting and give you updates about the state of Akonadi within KDE.
I also will explain what I did manage to do last months and I hope to get started on a project related to it. More about that later.
One of the things I do want to talk about is Mailody. It is dead. With tears in my eyes I’ve deleted it a month ago. Why? Because I decided to do so. This was triggered by a flow of people wanting to use Mailody. Still puzzled? Yes? Ok. Let me explain. I created Mailody years ago, because I wanted to change the mail reading experience of my users. I never ever wanted to go after KMail users. They do the things they do their way and that’s fine. I wanted to create a mail client which had an alternative interface, alternative way of doing things, like saving the sent mail not in a separate folder, but in the same folder to preserve threading, having the ability to do a quick reply to a message, without launching a full blown composer, etc. (I can go on, but it’s pretty pointless for a dead app). I’ve accomplished some of my goals, but failed in some area’s, like seducing other developers to help me.
I’ve also failed to create a substantial userbase to keep it alive. I think I was the only user. I never made the switch to Mailody4, because it was never ready for production use. I feel the users approaching me to start using Mailody4 were doing it for the wrong reasons. Not because they liked what I created, no, they wanted it because KMail in svn trunk isn’t ‘ready’. Although everyone is Free to use their own motivation, I don’t think Mailody4 should be used for production. It will reflect badly on Mailody, Akonadi and me. Although I told people not to use it, they still insisted, ‘it is in keg, so must work somehow’. Right. The only option I had left was to kill it from svn, and so I did.
Is it really dead, dead? No. There still is a chance I will pick it up. I’ve still some unfinished business there. But it won’t be anytime before KMail trunk has been released and everyone is happy using that again. That means the whole stack should be ready for usage again (imap, mailtransport, identies, kmime, akonadi). Then I will make sure the glue between them (Mailody) is working fine again. But not now.
As said, I’ll be a frequent blogger the next days, hoping to bring you some news from what’s happening in Berlin at the Akonadi Meeting.
That’s sad to hear about Mailody.
Even though I never used the application (Thunderbird has some features keeping me there for work and KMail did enough for the small amount of personal mail I receive), it was one of those projects that made you warm and fuzzy reading about it.
The idea that someone was pushing the envelope regarding email readers (bad pun intended) seemed to me to be an example of what makes FOSS so great in the same way that Plasma pushes the envelope regarding desktop integration.
I really hope that this isn’t the last we’ll here about this approach.
Best of luck with the Akonadi sprint.
David
I used Mailody4 some time before you ported it to Akonadi (for the port you had to break it severely, so it wasn’t working anymore). Sure, it was not production-ready, but it felt nice anyway. My reason for using it was, that KMail is too much for my use case; well I use KMail and I am mostly happy with it but I was always lookong forward to Mailody becoming usable again.
But well, I can understand your action. Sleeping projects can draw off energy if sleeping in public. And getting the PIM stack in shape seems much more important right now, yes. So good luck in Berlin. :)
Regards
Tom, Since you are going to the Akonadi meeting , can you get answers to the following question in the light of the current state of affairs in kdepim 10.04
a. Why did kde release such a broken system in 10.04
b. Why does Akonadi make a 750kb vcard file with 3500 contacts a 64Mb monster which takes ages to search even on a fast computer.
c. What will happen to Akonadi if our 1000′s of emails from multiple accounts is added into the system?
d. Why are we moving away from internationally accepted open standards in the Akonadi savings of our critical data? This kills exporting it to anything with a easy mechanism sounding like microsoft.
e. Where are the tested and working import and export filters for mail, contacts, calender, kjots and journal in Akonadi.
f. Akonadi currently cannot be trusted with our critical data as it eats it, transforms it into something we don’t want and have no easy way to back it up or migrate it to acceptable other open systems.
g. My last comment is I think Akonadi is in crisis and at a crossroad. It is not well thought through and a really bad idea for KDE. All for making a new type of search possible which a very few people really needs. I think we can do well to scrap it and focus attention into better packages which give customers confidence in the open source software. It cannot be good for a critical PIM software which people use every day and trust. The bigger the database gets, the more problems there will be.
@hvralpha No I won’t get you the answers. I don’t like how the questions are phrased.
There is no such thing as “kdepim 10.04″. There is the kdepim that the folks at (k)ubuntu chose to release with (k)ubuntu 10.04, but it was fully their decision what version of kdepim to use there, not KDE’s. There is also the version of kdepim that KDE chose to release with each version of KDE (4.0, 4.1, 4.2, etc), but distributions aren’t forced to use that version with a given distribution release. KDE doesn’t control kubuntu and kubuntu doesn’t own KDE.
Damn dude, it is in deed sad news. I know I have joked for years with you and ‘svn rm’ but you went ahead and did it. I know some day it will pop back up and rock as it did in KDE3!
@hvralpha
Those question can be easily answered.
(a) a ThBlackCat points out there is nothing like KDE or KDEPIM 10.04
(b) onwards are based on a wrong assumption that Akonadi would somehow transform or store data differently than current solutions. It doesn’t.
Nice and informative blog – I’m glad to see you doing such a good job of being ‘PIM talker’ this time around. I’m sorry for you that you had to kill Mailody too, but I respect your courage to put it down peacefully instead of letting it become a problem.
@hvralpha: Your points are interesting, but so badly phrased that nobody wants to answer you. And all of your questions boil down simply to this: “I DO NOT WANT A FULL PIM DATA + DESKTOP LINK, BECAUSE IS SOOOO SLOW AND I JUST DON’T LIKE IT”.
You can back up your data with Akonaditray. I assume that your slowness comes from the mail searching in KMail (10 year old, slow as hell, to be replaced in KDE 4.5, and, of course, with NO AKONADI and with an AKONADI-AWARE REPLACEMENT on sight).
If you find your mail slow, try Sylpheed and stop trolling. If you think there are backdoors set up for Microsoft, for the NSA, for DHS, for SETI or for Al Qaida, you can always read the code.
For me, it’s fast. It’s not perfect, but if you find flaws, file bugs and stop trolling.
Concerning your which to not destroy threading when answering to mails: I have several accounts in KMail and each of them always sends a mail mit BCC to the sending account itself. So I keep all sent and received mails together. The .mailfilter on the server is of course written to handle these cases ;-). So you can at least get this feature “for free”.
Thanks for trying! I also liked the idea of a reliable, fast mail reader. :-)