[Kde-pim] KDE Bug #146247 - Corporate Reliability

[Allen Winter]

On Tuesday 22 April 2008 11:31:45 Dyllan Pascoe wrote:
> Dear KDE Development Team,
>
Hi Dyllan,

A fix has been committed into the enterprise, 3.5, and trunk codebases for 
kdepim.  Please test at your earliest convenience and let us know if
the fix works to your satisfaction.

A fix in less than 24hrs since you contacted us about this.
Not too bad, huh?  :)


>
> Let me first start off by commending you for wonderful Open Source
> software. KDE in general is a great Desktop Environment and our business
> has been using it for well over 3 years. It is because of Community's like
> yours that people can be free of unruly licensing schemes, and enjoy free
> and open functional software applications.
>
> Having said that we are troubled by the Bug in subject. Our company relies
> heavily on quick email communication being in the Freight Forwarding
> Business. We are finding it very difficult to effectively use KMail while
> it does not autocomplete email address's from, 'Recent Addresses', internal
> LDAP Server & individually created Address Books.
>
> When composing an email our staff now need to click on the 'Select' button
> to the right of the composer window and type in the desired email address
> (1 by 1 i might add), which will then filter the list from the user input.
> This is extremely frustrating and a slow way to work. In an earlier version
> of KMail the user would only need to type the first few letters of the
> desired email address in the To,CC,BCC Field and be prompted with the
> closest matches to quickly select.
>
> As i have mentioned on the Bug List itself i do understand that all effort
> is now focused on KDE4 and manpower cannot be spent on this bug, however i
> feel that this flaw in KMail 3.5.x leaves a lot to be desired, the software
> is incomplete without the autocomplete function and cannot be considered as
> fully functional. I have spent almost 4 weeks researching this Bug for a
> possible fix but alas none. In the process i have visited countless linux
> forums specific to their distributions and read a number of requests for a
> resolution to this bug.
>
> Just for some background, our company name is Megafreight and we are
> located in South Africa. 5 years ago our Managing Director and myself
> brainstormed for an alternative to Micro$oft and to try and avoid the
> software giant at all costs. Since then we have implemented 5 fully
> functional linux desktop servers (in a terminal service environment), at 5
> different branches around South Africa, servicing +-250 users. We use
> Gentoo as our distro of choice and KDE as our Desktop Environment with the
> Kontact suite handling our Email, Address Book, Calendaring needs extremely
> well. We recently switched Email Applications from Thunderbird to KMail for
> a couple reasons, 1 being that we found KMail a lot faster/smoother and
> also because of the shared calendar.
>
> Right now we cannot explore the option of upgrading to KDE4 for a couple
> reasons, most importantly being that it is not marked stable on Gentoo as
> of yet, and KDE3 is working for us nicely except for this bug which is a
> pain in our side, so we do live by the policy "if it's not broken, don't
> fix it". So we would rather wait for it to be stable before upgrading, but
> we cannot do with the autocomplete function.
>
> We would really like your thoughts and feedback concerning our request and
> we truly hope that some time can be spent patching this bug. Having said
> that we understand that time is money and we would like to make a generous
> donation to the KDE Community, not purely for this bug to be patched, but
> because we feel that it is the right thing to do, and because we use KDE on
> a day to day basis, even though more recently KMail, we will also be
> setting up a yearly donation for as long as we use the software which we
> hope will be for a very long time to come.
>
> We look forward to your reply and hope that you will accept our invitation.
> A donation will be made shortly, as i said above, wether or not our
> invitation to patch the bug is accepted, so if you would like the specifics
> on the donation we will be happy to provide this on request.
>
> Thank you for your time.
>
>
> Server information
> Intel Xeon 2.4
> Kernel 2.6.23-gentoo-r6
> kde-base/kmail-3.5.8
>
>
> http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=146247


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