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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    Design of PIM, etc. (was Build KMail only?)
From:       Ian Wadham <iandw.au () gmail ! com>
Date:       2011-07-11 3:21:52
Message-ID: 6B882C1B-9CBD-4CA8-8CA0-B5098D1ABDD8 () gmail ! com
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On 11/07/2011, at 6:26 AM, Rui Maciel wrote:
> On 07/10/2011 05:35 PM, Tom Albers wrote:
> > You can talk all you want, you called akonadi and friends 'cruft' and I find that \
> > disrespectful and unneeded, you could have conveyed exactly the same message \
> > without the addition of the word 'cruft'.
> 
> Listen, I was very clear on what I've said.  So you can at least try to 
> understand what has been said, which wasn't the insult you perceived, or 
> you can keep on overreacting because someone used a word you didn't 
> approved.   Yet, the latter doesn't help anyone in any way, including 
> getting kmail to build on a platform which doesn't provide Akonadi, and 
> only adds noise to this mailing list.

Heh, heh, with friends like Rui who needs enemies? ... :-)  Seriously, though,
I was greatly surprised to wake up this morning (in Australia) and find that
this storm in a tea-cup had taken place.  Are we not professionals here and
can we not discuss the issue without focussing on one pejorative term?

Well, I have made my choice and given up KMail.  Three out of four of my
immediate family have between them two Macbooks, two iPads and two
iPhones, so I have acquired a Macbook to stay in sync with them.  I
already had an iPhone which holds all the contacts, etc. that I need and
it syncs automatically with my wife's iPhone and iPad contacts and
appointments over our house's wireless network.  So I have no need of
Akonadi and friends, hence my original query.  However I daresay I will
install a Linux-KDE development setup on the Macbook some time ... ;-)

My concern now is the tightly bound design of PIM software and also,
for that matter, Nepomuk, Strigi, Soprano and friends, which forced this
choice upon me.  Is this the way KDE is going to be for evermore?

Surely, PIM could be designed around a shared data source (a relational
database if you must) in such a way that the various applications can
exist independently of each other, in a loosely bound form.  Wasn't that
why some of us adopted and championed the separation of applications
and data in the 1970s and 80s?  KMail could even survive without the
data source.  I have used it without an address book for years and just
relied on its memory for recently used email addresses.  And if the user
wants Strigi and friends to index his/her emails, cannot KMail simply tell
them where to find the emails by updating a shared file or database?

Re Strigi and friends, why do we have to build all of them and their
dependencies (including Redlands, etc.) as a pre-requisite for building
KDE libs and other parts of KDE?  In the past few years I have spent
numerous hours chasing after Strigi and friends when updating and
building a development setup, but never have I had a second's worth
of benefit from them.  I used to think that KDE 4 is so highly complex
that it needed the resources of a semantic textual database to build
itself, but that does not seem to be the case.  I do not know what other
KDE developers think, but for me Strigi and friends are an intolerable
overhead on development work in KDE.  Cannot they be de-coupled?

All the best, Ian W.

 
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