Things needed (was: Re: Do we really need Korn ?)

[Ralf Nolden]

On Saturday 27 April 2002 08:34, Andy Fawcett wrote:

Ok, some things about that now and other stuff related to that. The point why 
korn is pretty useless is that there are people like me who are too stupid 
(or lazy) to fiddle with fetchmail or just any commandline tool to set up 
their machine. Korn just allows to set your mailbox, but that's it. It 
requires a backend that fetches the mail, right ? So, anyway, as I have kmail 
running all the time, I would prefer something that's in kmail directly. 
There is no reason not do implement that just because Korn is there. On the 
other hand, if Korn could set up an automatic mailfetching for me, that'd be 
fine as well. I think that's the point around the discussion. Don't get me 
wrong, I think Lauri's argument is a very valid one and I can understand now 
why korn is there. I just asked as said, I'm too dumb (or lazy) to set up a 
mailfetching underneath.

A similar situation is there for faxing. One might argue, faxing isn't very 
common anymore, but once in a while you just need it. So taking care of 
faxing is a need for a desktop environment. What does KDE provide there ? We 
can

-view faxes
-send faxes

What about receive ? The standard answer: use efax or hylafax on the 
commanline, whatever. I don't use it, so you need to look up some howtos how 
to receive faxes.

That isn't a good option :) Heck, I mean, even Windows 95 did better with 
Exchange. So, if someone with some experience there and some time would take 
care of that and integrate faxviewing and faxreceiving into a faxprogram (as 
well as sending), that would be cool. A daemon-like tray-applet for the 
receiving would be nice as well. The kfaxviewer is a kpart, so the viewing 
can be very easily integrated into a GUI. Also, if kfaxviewer can handle raw 
g3 files, kfax becomes obsolete. That is the only reason we still keep kfax 
in CVS instead of using kfaxviewer with kviewshell.

Next thing is viewing documents who are read-only anyway because there is no 
way to edit them. Those are: dvi, ps, pdf, g3 files. For those we have kdvi, 
kghostview and kfaxviewer, all three use kviewshell. So my idea of what would 
be useful would be a "Document Viewer" with kviewshell which opens up like 
kword with an open file dialog to select which document to load and then load 
the according part to view it. If anyone wants to do this, feel free to do so 
(I have to go on travels next week, so don't expect miracles from me).

> On Saturday 27 April 2002 00:57, Ingo Klöcker wrote:
> > On Thursday 25 April 2002 14:01, Ralf Nolden wrote:
> > > as the subject says - I'm wondering if even we developers ever use
> > > Korn ? (If you haven't even tried it, run it and tell me if you see
> > > a necessity of keeping it in kdenetwork, please).
> >
> > I use it at work. But soon (KDE 3.1) KMail will hopefully be able to
> > replace it.
>
> It might be nice, for those who want it, to have kmail provide this
> functionality, but as Lauri said in her message on the subject some
> people don't want kmail in memory all the time, especially on low
> specification machines.
>
> So, please don't plan to *replace* korn, because some people like it,
> use it, and don't want kmail running all the time.

-- 
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Ralf Nolden
nolden at kde.org

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