Thoughts on the Plasma Mobile calendar

[Carl Schwan]

Le lundi 21 juin 2021 à 18:41, Dimitris Kardarakos <dimkard at posteo.net> a écrit :

> Hello everyone,
>
> Back in 2018, the Plasma Mobile ecosystem consisted of just a handful of
> apps. After a short discussion with Bhushan, I stepped forward to work
> on Calindori, the calendar application for Plasma Mobile.
> Calindori is written in QML/C++, it is based on Kirigami and (tries to)
> follow the KDE HIG. As a Kirigami based application, it can also run on
> desktop. In particular, some desktop specific bits have also been added
> to improve the desktop UI/UX. You can find more details here [1]
> During Akademy 2019 in Milan, Nicolas Fella suggested that a plugin
> system is created [2] that would make Calindori (or any other
application that uses KCalendarCore) support various calendar backends.
> So, I have been maintaining Calindori trying to fulfill these requirements:
>
> 1.  Offer a mobile application, and try to leverage Kirigami convergence
>     capabilities to improve the desktop experience
> 2.  Support calendars that follow the iCalendar [3] standard using
>     KCalendarCore [4]
> 3.  Avoid to tightly couple the application with a specific calendar
>     backend (e.g Akonadi, Sink, etc)
> 4.  Adopt the plugin based approach for multiple calendars and online
>     synchronization support [5]
>     Let me now share my thoughts on the the "Plasma Mobile - Calendar" [6]
>     Google SOC project (you can track its progress here [7]).
>     People in the free software ecosystem are free to work on any project
>     they feel like. Certainly, the Google SOC mentor(s) may have a plan that
>     is not compatible with Calindori. However, I started Calindori in order
>     to enhance the Plasma Mobile ecosystem and have been trying hard to
>     maintain it over my limited volunteer contributor time. I am not
>     interested in entering in competition with anyone within the Plasma
>     Mobile team and the KDE community in general.
>     With all this in mind, if the Plasma Mobile team is not happy with the
>     approach of a Plasma Mobile calendar mentioned above and/or my work in
>     general, and they would like to adopt the Google SOC project approach, I
>     can step down as Calindori maintainer. Then, the Google SOC mentor(s)
>     could take over maintenance and merge their work with Calindori or just
>     continue with a separate application.

Hi Dimitry,

I'm sorry that you feel hurt. This wasn't my intention. My goal wasn't to
create a competition between Calindori and Kalendar when I started Kalendar
4 months ago and QuickMail. When I was working on some Kirigami Calendar
components and Plasma Desktop Calendar redesign, I discussed with you the
possibility to redesign Calindori, you weren't very enthusiastic about making
Calindori more complex and for example moving some view from simple ListView
to more complex views with the goal to make Calindori also great on the desktop
and more feature-complete with Korganizer.

And to be fair, I wasn't very enthusiastic either with the plugin system
My reasoning is that Akonadi is already an abstraction and adding an additional
abstraction on top for viewing events, editing events, adding calendars,
configuring calendars wouldn't be really easy to create and maintain. It doesn't
help that some data like the calendar name or the event colors are stored in
Akonadi/Sink instead of KCalendarCore. I might be wrong though.

Maybe we should set up a bof during Akademy and discuss this a bit? Merging
our efforts or creating shared calendar components could be a good idea?

Regards,
Carl

>
>     [1] https://invent.kde.org/plasma-mobile/calindori
>     [2] https://phabricator.kde.org/D24443
>     [3] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5545
>     [4] https://api.kde.org/frameworks/kcalendarcore/html/index.html
>     [5] https://invent.kde.org/plasma-mobile/calindori/-/merge_requests/37
>     [6] https://community.kde.org/GSoC/2021/Ideas
>     [7] https://claudiocambra.com/2021/06/14/first-week-of-google-summer-of-code-2021/
>
>     All the best,
>
>     --
>
>     Dimitris
>
>     https://dimitris.cc