Preannounce: Kroupware Project started

[Matthias Kalle Dalheimer]

On Wednesday 11 September 2002 03.30, Zack Rusin wrote:
> On Tuesday 10 September 2002 14:49, Matthias Kalle Dalheimer wrote:
> > The project deadline forbids us to follow the normal KDE development
> > schedule, and we are also concerned about introducing instability
> > into KMail and KOrganizer at this point in the KDE 3.1 release cycle.
> > We will therefore create our own branch called kroupware_branch in
> > the modules kdelibs, kdebase, kdenetwork and kdepim. We aim to
> > retrofit the changes on this branch as timely as possible back into
> > the HEAD branch; this will happen in close collaboration with the
> > maintainers of the affected projects, and following the KDE release
> > cycle.
>
> First of all - fantastic news, congratulations and hopefully we can help
> you guys somehow.
> Now if you don't mind a question:
> - what kind of changes to KMail are we talking about here? I'm not sure
> if you know but KMail has been branched lately to undergo some very
> much needed architectural changes. Now it seems that another branch is
> under way. This will make it almost impossible to merge all those
> branches. After only a few days I already had some problems merging
> changes from HEAD to make_it_cool, I can't imagine doing that between
> three branches. I hope we can come up with some reasonable solution.
> I'd propose using your branch for the architectural changes which were
> going to make_it_cool, because I can imagine you guys will have to
> rework/refactor a lot things in the process of working on your project
> in the first place. What do you guys think?

Well, the first thing is that we cannot possibly work in HEAD, because that 
will endanger the 3.1 release. And we can't work in make_it_cool either, 
because we need to approach stability by October 15. So we are forced to use 
our own branch, whether we like it or not (and we don't, for the most part).

I agree that merging can be a big problem. We'll try to minimize it by syncing 
our branch with HEAD regularly (planned is once a week). In an ideal world, 
we can - after consultation with the other KMail developers, of course - just 
dump our branch over HEAD, because we already have everything in HEAD. Then 
it's just to merge in make_it_cool into HEAD once that one stabilizes. And 
this can be made easier if the developers working on the make_it_cool branch 
merge HEAD changes into their branch as well on a regular basis.

Looking at the proposed list of changes in the make_it_cool branch, I can see 
only one right now that sort of clashes with what we need to do, and that is 
making KMail a KParts container. So we'll work together on that issue in the 
hope of achieving a common solution there. The other big change that we will 
have to introduce is an IMAP offline mode. The rest will mostly be additions 
to the user interface and judicious use of filters to pass incoming emails on 
to KOrganizer.

We'll write all this up in real architecture documents over the next 1-2 
weeks.

Kalle


-- 
Matthias Kalle Dalheimer
President&CEO/VD
Klarälvdalens Datakonsult AB
Platform-independent software solutions
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