Leaving KMail development

Michael Häckel haeckel at kde.org
Thu Nov 28 18:38:39 GMT 2002


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Hi,

I want to tell you that I want to leave KMail development. As completely as
possible. Reasons for this are as follows.

KMail has quite some time ago reached a state where it does completely fulfill
all my personal needs for an e-mail client. Everything I lately contributed
to KMail was either for other peoples needs or fixing things that broke but
worked before. This becomes an increasingly unthankful job especially if
these other people don't like my work, at least those shouting loudest.
There will probably be always a few people that try to convince the developers
that KMail is absolutely unusable but according to the latest Linux Journal
and C't articles it can't be that bad.

Besides that I'm tired of the huge amount of e-mail it's required to handle
daily as KDE developer. On mailinglists as well as in private mail. Also of
the fact that people expect me to be always reachable. Sorry, but there is
also sometimes a life without computers.

Additionally I'm tired of having regularely to fight with other people. Either
with unthankful users that believe to have a right to have all their support
questions answered in private mail by the maintainer or the feature they
requested implemented immediately or with developers that can't live with a
patch of them being rejected.

Instead there is a different area where I do have a strong personal need but
still no usable open source software exists. Maybe because not that many
people need it. Anyway I started a new project a few weeks ago. I will
publish it as soon as it has reached usefulness.

For the future of KMail I propose the following:
Ingo Klöcker takes over maintainership. Besides that it was proposed to me
that the work and responsibility will be shared by sub maintainers where
e. g. Marc Mutz wants to take over the config dialog, identities, filtering
and MIME parsing.

This proposal is so far agreed by Ingo, Marc and myself. As I recently lost my
own maintainer title because I tried to care for the quality of KMail I don't 
know what this is worth though. Anyway I don't want to waste my time with 
discussing this anymore, I just don't want to leave without having done my 
best that the project can continue well without me.

Regards,
Michael Häckel
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