After the couple hours sleep (‘Is this good for productivity in any way?), we started the last bit of the API review. We reviewed the akonadi changes between the KDE SC 4.4 release and current trunk, renamed method names, watched for const’s and made sure we did not do any binary incompatible changes.

After lunch, we had a small talk about deprecating all old API KDE has which deal with kresources. As Akonadi is the successor of those and that is approaching rapidely, it is time for developers to port all the remaining kresources usages. With marking that API as deprecated, they get nice little warnings while compiling….

After that we talked a bit about the development of kdepim in the next months, where in SVN that will happening, and how that matches the KDE policy around the upcoming freezes. More news on that later. We first need to talk to some more people.

In the meanwhile I adapted the accountwizard to the changes i described yesterday. And with good progress. We are now beta testing it and fixing the remaining bugs. Should be ready for the KDE-PIM 4.5.0 release.

Steven hacked on unit tests and proxymodels (what else, whahaha). Tobias fixed most issues brought up by the API-review and some small fixes in KAdressBook (of course). Volker fixed a couple of KMail bugs, answered loads of questions and stated just now ‘Now that you asked me, i did not really do that much’.

Kevin Krammer worked on the conversion tool for transferring the old data from kmail to the new akonadi based akonadi. It has challenges like reading the old cache folder, which can contain a mix between mbox and maildir files and directories. He promised to blog about that later on.

Sérgio spended his time on KOrganiser, fixed a bunch of bugs and made the journal editor working again. Matthew fixed the default layout for KMail and a bunch of bugs, for example he fixed the hated bug about the ‘kontact special date summary plugin’ (if scrabble had spaces, this would have been a winner) hang now and then. Now ported to Akonadi properly.

Thomas deprecated the KResources API and bugxing and porting on KMail. Kevin Ottens worked the past days on the kimap implementation, writing unit tests, heck a whole framework. Users can activate a logfile to provide debug output about the imap process. That logfile can then be replayed with his framework, to exactly reproduce bugs.

You can see, that we are working in very many area’s at the same time. preparing our software for the next release. More tomorrow…

After that we started with API-Review of the Mailtransport classes. Around 1920 everyone used to use their local sendmail application to deliver mail. That was ordered to deliver the mail as soon as the 14k4 modem has made a connection to the internet. A bit later people started to depend on the SMTP method to send mail. The application send the email to the provider which provides your internet connection and then it’s done. But now we are starting to support Microsoft Exchange Servers, we need a new way of sending mail. The feature Microsoft Exchange offers is that it also deals not only with incoming mail but also with outgoing mail. That means we needed to adapt our Mailtransport library to know which Akonadi Resources are capable of sending email.

When you compose a mail you have a selection bar, where you can indicate which provider/transport should be used for sending. That now has been extended to also show the resources that are capable of sending it. And that required a lot of changes. We combined it with nice features as sending messages after a specific date and time and moving messages after they have been send to a certain folder. To our surprise the whole morning was filled with reviewing the API and we have a pretty long list of stuff that has to change there.

After lunch we continued with the API review of IdentityManager. In this KDE cycle support has been added for images within signatures. Signatures in the context of mail messages which can hold company disclaimers for example. A much requested feature was that people (or company policy) needed to insert there company logo in the signature. A couple of KDE releases ago we added support for html based signatures and now we added the support for images. And those images need to be stored somewhere. But in a application independent way. The identities you setup are shared between KMail and Mailody and we need to prevent that breaks with the set image in the signature when you switch between those clients.

Continuing with yet more API review (really a weekend is to short for this). We continued with the API review of the widgets and classes provided by the new address book application. The classes are all in a library so other application can make use of them. One of the discussion points was about the dialog. When you for example click on a phone number and you have a voip phone, it can actually dial that phone number, the same goes for an email address. When you click it the default mail client is opened and the composer is launched. But if you show the dialog in an open composer, you want to add that address to the addressee list of that composer. Implementing that without making the API ugly needed some thinking.

In the evening Brad showed us the progress on Exchange support. He demonstrated Akonadi fetching mails, addresses and appointments from the Exchange server. Although it is in pre-alpha stage, it already shows that the resource is on the right track. From his side, there are pending requests for free-busy listing support and support for filtering. Both will be implemented sooner or later. His biggest problem, the mail sending part, is solved recently.

After that, we did an overview of the pim current situation:

• KOrganizer: Porting is going on, but we will not manage to release an Akonadi based version for KDE 4.4, so that will show up not earlier than 4.5
• KJots: A relatively new addition to the pim module is KJots. It is fully Akonadified and will be released with 4.4 as usual.
• Work on the SyncML client is improving steadily. It will be merged into KDE 4.4. It is an Akonadi Agent and I think we still need an GUI for it, but the framework will be there. I’ll blog about it more when we have had the demo.
• We have little trust OpenSync will ever deliver what we need. That means all the code we have using that, will move to playground. That includes the KitchenSync application.
• KAddressBook is Akonadified and will be released with KDE 4.4. We still need to port some PIM application to use the new KAddressBook API instead of the old one, but that’s work in progress.
• KMail: Porting is steadily continuing and progressing nicely. Though it won’t be ready for KDE 4.4.
• KNotes, it is largely unmaintained I think. The functionality is probably taken over by KJots and the notes plasmoid. So we will remove it from kdepim.
• Wizards. Volker has a prototype for configuring your mail client, based on kross script / get hot new stuff. Basically the idea is that you can select that you have a GMail account for example. All the right settings are then provided and the user only has to enter the username and the password. GHNS can provide new or updated scripts and this makes it possible for companies to deploy there own scripts to their users.

We also discussed the possibility to get rid of KUniqueApplication for kdepim applications. With the move to Akonadi the technical problems of the back-end is gone, so we can actually can rid it of it. It has some consequences for the communication in relation to standalone vs. apps in Kontact, so that requires further investigation.

Also we decided that we want to get rid of all DBus calls which control other application. Instead of launching KAddressBook and order it over DBus to show a contact. Apps should simply show a dialog which holds the contact data, much more friendly for the users. Every application that is getting ported to Akonadi should keep that in mind; provide widgets that can be reused by other application.

After we went out for dinner, we started on the API review. Due to a lot of KDAB activity in combination with the work of some SOC students, we have an enormous amount of API to review. We started with the stuff from Akonadi core and finished way after midnight.