kdenetwork/kmail

[Zack Rusin]

On Wednesday 18 September 2002 21:28, Neil Stevens wrote:
> On Wednesday September 18, 2002 05:47, Ingo Klöcker wrote:
> > On Thursday 19 September 2002 01:46, Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> > > perhaps when this is done it will be time again to return to a
> > > more conservative approach.
> >
> > We'll see.
>
> I hope Don's fork is permanent.  I see no reason for KMail to lag
> behind the rest of KDE.  You get good code by careful design and
> thorough testing, not by stifling development.
>
> Also, having two mail clients will lead to greater choice for KDE
> users.

Under different circumstances I'd whole heartily agree with you, but 
everyone has to realize is that in the last months only nine (count 
them all - pokemon style) developers has been contributing to KMail on 
a frequent basis. I'm afraid that we don't have enough people to fork. 
Besides at this point I don't see why we should have a fork. Last night 
I started a discussion on kmail list trying to get to see what exactly 
divided us [1]. Carsten[2], Ingo[3], Marc[4], Don[5], Bo[6] and others 
expressed their concerns. We talked almost about everything - from 
'mimelib to KMime migration' through 'zero-copy parsing' to 'KMail as 
KPart'. We all agreed on the fact that altough solutions in 
make_it_cool need some work they are superior and will be integrated 
into HEAD after feature-freeze is over. So IMHO there would be 
something very wrong if the team would split up after agreeing on the 
future of KMail. The problems we're struggling right now include:
- who's the maintainer bs,
- what form of development we want to have - 
o conservative with less bugs, trying to resolve all problems 
incrementally without breaking anything in the process.
o rapid where we jump onto fixing architectural problems and work on 
them as long as necessary and start fixing bugs when the architecture 
is in place,
And to be honest, I just don't think these two are such a good basis to 
fork and split the team. Of course when the fork becomes reality, I'll 
make my choice, so will others and hopefully we can all do it in a 
somehow more mature manner then we lead this discussion in right now.

Zack

[1] http://lists.kde.org/?l=kmail&m=103229136525650&w=2
[2] http://lists.kde.org/?l=kmail&m=103229439529489&w=2
[3] http://lists.kde.org/?l=kmail&m=103230768410793&w=2
[4] http://lists.kde.org/?l=kmail&m=103232358420708&w=2
[5] http://lists.kde.org/?l=kmail&m=103238544720676&w=2
[6] http://lists.kde.org/?l=kmail&m=103233732430077&w=2

-- 
militant agnostic: i don't know, and you don't know either.