Thoughts on the Plasma Mobile calendar

[Aleix Pol]

On Mon, Jun 21, 2021 at 8:15 PM Dimitris Kardarakos <dimkard at posteo.net> wrote:
> On 21/6/21 8:12 μ.μ., Carl Schwan wrote:
> > 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
>
> Hello Carl,
>
> let me disagree with you on the content of the discussion we had in the
> past. In particular, we had an one-off short and friendly chat on Matrix
> where I was pretty open to any kind of UI/UX redesign. With regards to
> the plugin abstraction, I mentioned (and I still believe) that the
> Plasma Mobile calendar should not be tightly coupled to a specific
> backend. But that’s just my technical point of view and I may be wrong
> on this. Till then, no further discussion on any kind of joint work took
> place either in public or in private.
>
> With all due respect, let me clarify the motive of starting this
> community discussion. I am mostly interested in discussing the fact
> that, based on any, minor or major technical details on how a Plasma
> Mobile calendar should work, a Google SOC project was suggested and
> kicked off.
>
> All the best,

It sounds clearly to me that there's been some kind of
miscommunication. Would it be possible to have a BoF on the topic over
the week? Or maybe we can discuss it on the next Plasma Mobile meeting
(scheduled for Friday 2nd at 14h UTC).

Aleix