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

Fri Apr 1 16:09:30 BST 2011

On Friday 01 April 2011 14:56:36 Martin Klapetek wrote:
> 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?

no, that's also missing.

> 
> > - 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?

One way of reducing the scope to something manageable in 3 month would be to 
primarily focus on the backend technology and only do minimal application 
integration by using Pimo:Person additionally instead of a full port, for e.g. 
just showing the online status, basically only as a test case that all the 
backend stuff does what it is supposed to do. This also avoids the need for 
non-Nepomuk fallback code etc. for now.

> > > 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 ;)

I have access to the proposals now, I'll review it as soon as I have time.

> > > 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.

regards
Volker
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