[Kde-pim] Re: GSoC Idea - Integrating with Nepomuk Person and Telepathy

[Martin Klapetek]

On Wed, Mar 30, 2011 at 18:37, Volker Krause <vkrause at kde.org> wrote:

> Hi Martin,
>
> On Sunday 27 March 2011 18:09:01 Martin Klapetek wrote:
> > my name is Martin Klapetek and I've been working with kde-telepathy team
> for
> > past few months. The ultimate goal of kde-telepathy team is to get
> > Telepathy deeply integrated into KDE.
> >
> > Today we discussed some ideas and it came to my mind, that it would be
> great
> > to have Telepathy integrated with PIM. The main idea is to see the online
> > status of your contacts inside PIM apps like KAddressBook, Kontact, KMail
> > etc. and also a possibility to start a chat/video/audio call over
> Telepathy
> > (we'll be doing a pre-release of basic Telepathy components soon). With
> > this idea we came to talk about how it would be possible and George
> > Goldberg of kde-telepathy hinted, that it was a "dream" to integrate
> > PIMO:Person into PIM for some time. And the Person class would be just a
> > great way for integrating the online statuses and the rest of Telepathy
> > stuff.
>
> yes, that's definitely something we want to have :)
>
> > So the GSoC project would basically include integrating Nepomuk's
> > PIMO:Person into KDE PIM and then integrating KDE PIM with Telepathy with
> > the PIMO:Person approach.
>
> well, it's not that easy ;) Here are some things to consider:
> - currently we create NCO:PersonContacts objects in Nepomuk for every vCard
> contact, email recipient/sender, event attendee, etc we encounter. These
> need
> to be aggregated into PIMO:Person objects. This includes finding
> NCO:PersonContacts that refer to the same person as well as ignoring
> entries
> that are no person at all (spam, mailinglists, etc). Otherwise you'll end
> up
> with quite some useless garbage in the addressbook.
>

True. I like the Android phones approach here - you can manually merge
contacts together and make one big contact from all those. The actual
proposal also recognizes need for some way of merging the contacts,
especially with the Telepathy ones. Telepathy already makes use of Person,
so this merger could be simply extended to allow you to merge several
NCO:PersonContacts into one Person as well as adding a Telepathy account.


> - a way to manually merge PIMO:Person objects that actually refer to the
> same
> person but the software couldn't detect it automatically. This includes
> dealing with conflicts etc.
>

Yeah, that would again be part of the "merger". I think of it as a
standalone app, which would consist of reusable lib and some easy and usable
UI.


> - some of the NCO:PersonContacts refer to vCard contacts that are actually
> writable, so when changing the corresponding PIMO:Person we need to write
> back
> those changes (so it's propagated back to eg. the groupware server they
> came
> from).
>

Does it currently work in such way that when you edit the NCO:PersonContact
it also propagates the changes back?


> - porting KDE PIM to be PIMO:Person based is a huge task, for kaddressbook
> it
> would basically be a full rewrite of the application
>
> Hm, if we don't go for the full port but just augment the contact display
> by
> the online status retrieved from the PIMO:Person object in the first step,
> we
> can skip the write back problem for now, as well as many changes to the
> applications, making this actually doable within a GSoC project.
>

It is true that it's rather big task. So you propose to only add those
Telepathy features around PIM without the underlying Person?


>
> > What do you think about this idea?
>
> I like it, but it requires some more detailed definition on what is part of
> this project, this topic can easily get way too big for a single GSoC
> project.
> But working on the foundations of the PIMO:Person-ification would be a very
> welcome project IMHO.
>

I already submitted my proposal, if you're signed up as a mentor, try
checking it out in Melange (I can always update it). Basically it boils down
to four steps - Add Person into PIM, create the "merger", adjust the apps to
Person, add Telepathy features. Of course I'm open to any changes in that.
There is also some projects about Plasma integration with Telepathy's Person
use, so if this would go for a full Person integration, this could be a real
awesome thing for KDE then :) But as your point of view on this is probably
better as you know the PIM far better than me and if you think it's too big
for GSoC, then let's adjust it ;)


>
> > Also would someone be willing to mentor?
>
> yes, I'm interested in (co-)mentoring a project in this area, I can at
> least
> cover the KDE PIM side, but I lack the in-depth Nepomuk knowledge to cover
> all
> of this. But I'm sure we'll find support from the Nepomuk team for this :)
>

Yeah, if anything, George G knows the Nepomuk side of things very well and
I'm sure he'd help in this.

Marty


>
> regards
> Volker
>
>
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