The Future or KDE PIM Releases

[Daniel Vrátil]

Greetings from Toulouse!

We've been discussing the plans for releases of Akonadi(Next) and KDE PIM as a 
whole on the PIM sprint, because the current situation is kinda unclear and 
harmful for the project.

Now that we have a better idea of what Akonadi Next will be like, we decided 
that we don't want to just basically stop working on PIM and focus all our 
efforts towards Akonadi Next because that would cause the entire PIM to be in
sort of a limbo for who-knows-how-long and that would not be good for our 
users and for the project in general. We are already losing users so freezing
the development of the project does not sound like a good idea.

Instead we will aim towards releasing KF5-based KDE PIM with "Akonadi 1" in 
the next release of KDE Applications in August. That means we now have about 4
months to make sure that there are no regressions caused by changes in Qt 
behavior - this should be manageable and not much effort really. This is an 
internal change more or less, users won't notice anything.

Once the release is done, Christian will start focusing on Akonadi Next while
me, Laurent and others will focus on preparing PIM applications for the switch
to Akonadi Next (alongside normal development and maintenance). This involves
mostly getting rid of all Akonadi references from the code and replacing them
with domain-specific objects ("Email", "MailFolder" ,"Calendar", etc.), and 
writing a translation layer that will translate between Akonadi and the 
domain-specific objects. This is basically what Zanshin does and it works 
really really well for them. It's something we would have to do with Akonadi 
Next anyway. Once this is done (and once Akonadi Next is done) we simply 
switch the translation layers in applications to use Akonadi Next instead of 
Akonadi and be done with it. We find this to be the least disruptive approach 
for users since we will have stable and regular releases of KDE PIM while 
steadily working towards the switch and then just switching to Akonadi Next 
at some point, ideally without users really noticing.

However we realize that the amount of KDE PIM developers is not really enough
to cover all the PIM projects and applications, so we decided that we will 
only release components that have an (active) maintainer and that we feel we 
have enough manpower to work on. We will do an extragear release of the 
remaining projects at the same time as KDE Applications, but with no guarantee
of further releases or maintenance.

This is the current state - stuff that gets released in August with KDE 
Applications is considered "PIM Core", everything else is extragear.

Akregator
  - needs maintainer
  - release from extragear, unless a maintainer appears, then release with 
Applications as part of PIM core

Blogilo:
  - needs maintainer
  - no release in August, unless a maintainer appears, then release with 
Applications as part of PIM core

KAddressBook
  - maintained by Laurent
  - part of PIM core, release with KDE Applications in August

KOrganizer
  - maintained by Sergio
  - part of PIM core, release with KDE Applications in August

KAlarm
  - maintained by David Jarvie
  - release standalone in extragear, if David is willing to take care of that, 
otherwise no release

Kleopatra
  - needs maintainer
  - part of PIM core, release with KDE Applications in August

KMail
  - maintained by Laurent
  - part of PIM core, release with KDE Applications in August

KNotes
  - maintained by Laurent
  - part of PIM core, release with KDE Applications in August

Kontact
  - maintained by Laurent
  - part of PIM core, release with KDE Applications in August

With regard to Akonadi resources, we will NOT release KDE Accounts, Kolab 
Proxy (the old Kolab resource), Facebook, OpenXChange, Tags, NNTP and 
KBookmarks resources. We are desperately looking for maintainers for Maildir 
and MBox resources.

Regarding our underlaying libraries, we intend to release the following 
frameworks as soon as possible, since they are kdelibs4support-free, so we 
only need to review them:
 - GPGME++
 - KContacts
 - KLDAP
 - KMbox
 - Syndication

In the next rounds we will release the following frameworks, after we removed
their kdelibs4support dependency:
 - KMime
 - KIMAP
 - KCalCore

We believe that especially KContacts, KCalCore, KMime and KIMAP will draw a
lot of attention to KDE Frameworks, since there seems to be a demand for this 
kind of libraries.

The remaining kdepimlibs libraries (including Akonadi libs) will be released 
with KDE Applications as "PIM libraries".

We very much encourage other developers to step up for maintainership of any 
of the frameworks or applications above to reduce the workload of the current 
PIM team and help make KDE PIM awesome again.

We would welcome feedback and opinions from other PIM devs who are not here in
Toulouse. If everyone is fine with this proposal, we will put this plan to 
work as soon as possible.

Regards,
Daniel

-- 
Daniel Vrátil
www.dvratil.cz | dvratil at kde.org
IRC: dvratil on Freenode (#kde, #kontact, #akonadi, #fedora-kde)

GPG Key: 0x4D69557AECB13683
Fingerprint: 0ABD FA55 A4E6 BEA9 9A83 EA97 4D69 557A ECB1 3683
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