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List:       kde-core-devel
Subject:    Re: Proposal: package split
From:       Rik Hemsley <rik () kde ! org>
Date:       1999-10-02 18:07:29
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#if Harri Porten
> a) we now have several apps doubling the functionality of others. Why
> not give developers of all these mailers and sirc clients etc. a chance
> to compete with others. Users should have the opportunity to freely
> choose whatever apps they like for a specific task. Competition will be
> good. If I look at other RPMs on my distributions CD I can't spot other
> monster collections like ours.

Counter-argument:

There are three mail clients in CVS. KMail, KMail2 and Empath.

Stefan Taferner contacted me to say that he had started trying to port
kmail2 to KDE2 and found it hard work to convert the message parser,
so asked if he could join in the work on Empath. I said yes, but he
never replied.

I'm trying to integrate mail, news and addressbook. You're suggesting we
keep them as separate entities ? I want to be able to search through all
of these via kfind, and compose messages from within KWord.

A _lot_ of planning has been done for KabII, and the implementation is
now working, save some problems with kded.

I've been writing Empath for 11 months now, and I'm trying hard to work
out the CORBA stuff, so that it may be run as a server.

Empath is not going to compete with e.g. Magellan from a UI point of view for
a while, so if it was a separate client, no-one would use it.

Users don't understand that having a Maildir based client that doesn't stall
the UI is to their advantage. They'll use whatever has pixmap backgrounds
and extra 'features'.

After nearly a year of writing Empath, during which I have published my
proposal for the whole PIM thing, have written a comprehensive document
for programmers describing exactly how the complex internals work,
giving a useful introduction to how to code for it, and carefully documented
the API, I have received a total of six patches from two different people.

As for KabII, I've done all the work on the design and coding of the backend.
Don Sanders has produced a nice UI which he now has to integrate with
the backend. Mirko is working with us on the defaults for the entity structure.

If there were more people actually working on these IMO important things,
rather than separate projects to produce yet another standalone client
then perhaps we'd get somewhere.

Just my 0.02 euro. I know that programmers will always work on what they want
to, and I'm not saying Empath and KabII are the best designed apps on the
planet. Programmers also tend to like to start new projects - they know
the code better that way. Why another news client is being written, though,
I have no idea. Empath is designed to handle news and the hooks to put
the support in are already there.

Cheers,
Rik

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