[Digikam-users] Digikam dependency on akonadi

[Karl Günter Wünsch]

On 08/24/11 08:24, Martin (KDE) wrote:
> I don't know why, but most users don't like akonadi and nepomuk.
Because they are breaking over and over and over again. If I count the
time that I had to spend getting these wretched things to compile (not
working but compile) due to their external dependencies - I'd rather see
them gone for good than spend one more minute going through the next
iteration of them... And if anything goes wrong with the database they
rely on - which is a normal occurrence on all the computers running KDE4
I have to tend to - you're up the creek without a paddle if you don't
happen to be a database expert of sorts. As you explained the next
iteration of this malarchy is already on it's way, this time it's sqlite
- for which IIRC there aren't any proper administrative tools available.
> Anyway: You can tag photos with data from the address book and this
> needs kdepim and akonadi. 
Another useless feature for some - I for one am taking about 15,000+
photos in a year and of those not a single one will have people in it
(most of them literally no people at all, I am a nature photographer)
that I know or if I know them I wouldn't add to my address book (sports
personalities at sporting events)! I can even understand why someone
with known people in his photos would like to rip out the dependency -
because every time they give a picture to someone else they'd need to
remove that information anyway to protect the anonymity of the people
depicted (even if they have permission to publish these photos, tagging
these photos when publishing may well be illegal in Germany for example).

> I think it is a great idea to have a shared
> address book for all apps with one simple (or may be not that simple)
> interface (same is true for calendar).
I think it's a path that will drive some people away from digikam for
good. IMHO an address book has no place in an image editing application
- I can even give you cases (such as the above sporting events or
concerts) where your address book must not be used.
> 
> For faster search from outside digikam you can enable nepomuk data store
> in digikam (all tags are stored in nepomuk as well). This can be
> switched in digikam settings.
I have just switched from kmail to thunderbird because I want to get rid
of the resource hogs (and points of severe data loss) that akonadi and
nepomuk turned out to be. My machine has 8Gb of RAM, high end 4 core
processor, fast disks to accomodate fast image editing but nepomuk and
akonadi happily tried to take all they could get. So count me in for a
nepomuk and akonadi (and face detection) free digikam which does only
what it says on the tin: picture editing and collection management.
Especially Nepomuk storage is highly unstable and I couldn't tell you
how many times I had to remove the whole database to get it working
again - so all information that happens to be stored only there I
consider non existent in the first place.
regards
Karl Günter