[Kde-pim] Using Akonadi on other platforms than KDE

[Gregory Schlomoff]

Hello guys,

As some of you may already be aware, we are a small startup building a
cross-platform email client with Qt. We are using KIMAP (with the KDE
dependencies stripped out so it depends only on Qt) to fetch the mail data,
and started writting a few lines of code to implement basic caching. This
led us to realize that instead of reinventing the wheel, Akonadi could be a
very nice option for us.

So, let's get to the point. In an *ideal* world; we would like to be able
to:

1. git clone git://[some kde url]/akonadi
2. run CMake, or qmake, or whatever.
3. get a nice akonadi.lib file that we could link against our program
4. Spend some time reading the documentation, and learn how to use the API.

Of course, I realize we do not live in an ideal world. In the real world,
here's what happening:

1.  I followed the instructions here
http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/PIM/MS_Windows#Building
2. After executing step 4 - emerge kdepimlibs I've got a somewhat scaring
11+ Gb of data in my previously empty kderoot directory, and the the build
process has failed on "Linking CXX shared module ..\bin\kdewebkitwidgets.dll
[...] fatal error LNK1120: 20 unresolved externals"

If anyone knows how I can fix this issue, that would be very useful. But the
point that I want to bring to this mailing list is that from what I
understand, Akonadi has been designed to be desktop-agnostic, but there is
almost no information on how to reuse it on other platforms than KDE.

We are willing to put some time and some development effort into this, but
we need some pointers.

- What are the general steps to use akonadi as a library for a program?

- Is that a good idea at all? Since Akonadi is designed to serve as a
central cache for several PIM apps, does it make any sense to try to use it
a library for a stand-alone app ?

- How functional is Akonadi, as of now? I recall installing the whole KDE
for windows, a few months ago, and trying to use KMail. It was unusable.
Lots of messages about Akonadi server not being started. I suppose this is
fixed by now, but I am somewhat insecure about how easy to use / streamlined
Akonadi really is. My first impression (again, this was a *first*
impression, and months ago) was that it was somewhat bloated. On the other
hand, people are building Akonadi for mobile devices, so this seems to
suggest it's pretty clean and tight.

Any thoughts / inputs will be highly appreciated. We are still evaluating
the cost / benefit ratio of using Akonadi as our app cache, and from what
I've seen up to now, the benefits seems to be quite high, but I'm really not
sure about the costs...

Thanks,

Greg
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