[Kde-pim] GSoC: Easy Import and Export of all PIM data in Kontact

[Kevin Krammer]

On Thursday, 2010-03-25, Maciek Zarzycki wrote:
> On Wednesday 24 March 2010 12:19:29 Kevin Krammer wrote:
> > We had a GSOC project for a general userdata backup/restore application
> > called Kamion [1] but work on it has stalled.
> 
> I took a brief look at Kamion but it seems like it got abandoned before it
> reached any usable state (correct me if I'm wrong).

No, I think you are right.
As far as I remember it had something to do with not getting enough 
information about individual apps' backup needs (which files, etc).
Since it has stalled again after a GSOC as an attempt to revive it, it is 
highly unlikely that it will get another GSOC slot again.

> > While Import/Export are to some extend part of a backup situation, they
> > can go way beyond that use case, e.g. importing from a foreign storage
> > format, maybe including foreign metadata, account settings, etc.
> >
> > One of the advantages of doing this for PIM is that all data is (will be)
> > accessed through the same API, Akonadi, thus allowing to share more code
> > between handlers for specific data types.
> >
> > We have some code for importing (or rather migrating) data and settings
> > from legacy KDE PIM storage methods, but a generalization ideally capable
> > of importing all data types and related settings from other PIM suites,
> > e.g Evolution, would be a really nice addition to our offerings.
> 
> This is exactly what I had in mind.  It would be grate to allow consistent
> import/export in all KDE PIM applications. Thanks to a plugin architecture
>  we could start with the import/export framework and few plugins (lets say
>  mail and calendar) and add other data types later on.

I thought about using plugins as well and it generally sounds like a good 
idea. However, IMHO designing a plugin based infrastructure is way more 
complex than sharing code between different importers/exporters by ways of 
libraries.

But if you can come up with a compelling architecture than can satisfy various 
scenarios, go for it :)

> > I would be willing to mentor that.
> 
> I would be very happy to work under with you on this task. How about I
>  prepare a small specification of what I have in mind and send it to you on
>  priv? Perhaps you could give me some feedback before I start writing the
>  proposal?

Sure, go ahead.

Cheers,
Kevin
-- 
Kevin Krammer, KDE developer, xdg-utils developer
KDE user support, developer mentoring
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