[Kde-pim] kmail handbook

[Thomas McGuire]

Hi Manfred,

On Sunday 30 November 2008 14:18:38 tic wrote:
> a few days ago I volunteered for rewriting/reviewing the KMail handbook by
> entering my name in
> https://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Documentation/KDE4#KMail.
> Before I did so I informed Paul Allen about this venture and he probably
> was so happy that somebody applied for that job at all that he even forgot
> to ask me if I was actually up to the task :-)
>
> Though that remains to be seen I'd still like to introduce myself so that
> you firstly, can estimate who you are dealing with and secondly, can start
> figuring how to actually deal with me ;-)
>
> My name is Manfred Mislik and I am a, more or less, faithful KDE user since
> the late nineties (I started with the beta release that should become KDE
> 1.0 I believe) on a distro that was called DLD (Deutsche Linux
> Distribution) and eventually was swallowed by RedHat.
>
> I am not a hacker, mostly because I don't really like to program with such
> finicking, fussy systems that even complain when there's a period or a
> comma missing somewhere and that can't actually figure anything out by
> themselves :-) Still, I know my way around with bash, perl, php and even
> c++ but only so far that I *can* understand what I'm seeing. For
> programming as such I'm just too impatient. Sorry.
>
> Because I've been working with GNU/Linux generally and KDE specifically for
> such a long time, I wondered how I could give something back to the
> community. Programming itself was ruled out pretty soon, but to help
> writing the documentation is something I feel like I can be comfortable
> with.

Welcome! It is great news that somebody wants to update the KMail handbook, it 
wasn't updated since 2004 or so, and is quite outdated. I'm happy that there 
are people like you who don't program but contribute in other ways, because we 
programmers don't like writing documentation much :)

> So, here I am, waiting for your suggestions what are the most pressing
> items that need a rewrite and/or update in the KMail handbook while I'm
> reading myself through the KDE specific docbook documentation and pester
> the documentation team with my questions.

About the most pressing items: I guess that is pretty much everything. The 
handbook wasn't updated for 4 years, so the whole thing is probably out of 
sync with reality by now.
Some items there are plain wrong now (for example the spellchecking sections 
says that spellcheck is not possible in HTML mode, which is not true anymore). 
I guess you should go through the entire handbook and test if the sections 
still are correct.
Then the other thing are new features which were added and have no 
documentation at all. On the top of my head, those are templates, message 
tags, the new folder list and message list which were introduced in KDE 4.2.0 
Beta 1, a new signature editor, setting per-account identities for IMAP 
accounts and many more which I don't remember now.

> And soon I'm going to pester you folks as well with my questions. But
> that's a different story.

That's OK, I fully expect that some features or some GUI entries are unclear, 
many of them can only be understood after reading the handbook (which you'll 
be writing) or by having deeper knowledge of mail handling stuff.
Feel free to ask us.

> On freenoe you find me as tictric.

I'm the KMail maintainer, so you can ask me questions on IRC (tmcguire there).

Just one last thing: SVN trunk is frozen for new documentation at the moment 
(to give the translators a chance to translate it before the KDE 4.2.0 
release). So you can't update the docbook in SVN, it is probably best to make 
a copy somewhere. Maybe ask the documentation team about this, they could know 
more about how to handle this.

Regards,
Thomas
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