[Kde-pim] *******, akonadi

[Del]

Everybody please stop using the f**k headline on this correspondence.
It is a disgrace, and it makes me sick every time I see it.

Lindsay, I will try to answer your concerns from a fellow user's perspective.

On Fri, Apr 13, 2012 at 2:10 AM, Lindsay Mathieson
<lindsay.mathieson at gmail.com> wrote:
> I see a lot of mention of the advanced features that akonadi can support
> that others (such as Thunderbird) don't - but we've been hearing that for
> years now.

Thunderbird doesn't do simple groupware functionality with anything
but Google services last time I checked. The Kolab support in
Thunderbird makes me want to cry out loud, have a look at it and that
should give you a clear hint at one of the really strong reasons for
Akonadi. Even the calendar stayed as an add on until quite recently.
How about Exchange support? Mozilla just got a new deal with Google,
fuelling them with money that I assume eclipse the combined assets for
the KDE software collection. They only have to make a browser and a
groupware client, and even today Firefox is a nightmare in corporate
environments with it's stupid lock files. How about the custom gui
tool-kit, come on, have you ever even considered developing for
Mozilla? If any, Thunderbird is a great example of how well designed
groupware functionality is in KDE.

 And a lot of the features sound real nice but are in the
> "wouldn't it be cool if" category - ie. wouldn't it be cool if you cross
> reference all your facebook, email contacts with emails and references to
> "xyz ...". And they are all potential - no actual concrete.

Now I believe you are mixing things. You are probably ranting at
Nepomuk here. The idea of a semantic desktop and context dependent
information seems very ambitious, but in this age of endless amounts
of information flooding in, I believe we will all come to a point
where we find that a necessity. Right now, KDE has dared pioneering
the field, demonstrating how open development can drive innovation.
Nepomuk is arguably the most successful attempt at achieving it. Was
it overly ambitious? Maybe, but then again it got substantial EU
funding, and now it actually works (check out the latest code). Can we
learn from the experience? Probably, but it is hard to predict how
lowered ambitions for the KDE desktop would have played out. Right now
I am really happy with the choices made.

 In the mean
> time the basics don't work. Address book sync. Calendar Sync, Address
> lookup.

They work for me, all of them. Are you using 4.8.2 now? Maybe you are
using other protocols? A main achievement of Akonadi, it is a modular
framework to support just about any protocol, not all implementations
being equally mature yet. Kolab syncing has been remarkably stable
though.

> Side Note: Oddly enough Android does an excellent job of linking all my
> face book, gmail and phone contacts. Akonadi doesn't.

Really? My shiny Galaxy S2 doesn't even sync my address book at work,
which is using the _only_ groupware protocol Android supports, namely
Microsoft's activesync. Not to mention, it has no support for
scheduling. Have you tried syncing it with a large mailbox? It utterly
fails to provide even the most basic functionality. And it has the
corporate backing of Google and Samsung, being a key product for both.
Kontact touch and Necessitas is the closest I am going to get having
something useful on the gadget. Flooding my address list with contacts
from facebook and gmail is not exactly a feature I enjoy. So how is it
that Android still can make an entry in the enterprise market, well
because the offerings from Apple and Microsoft (and RIM for that
matter) are no better in this respect, even being also very high
profile projects in those respective companies, I find it simply
amazing to see how far kde-pim have brought us. You are aware that
Google keeps a lot of this functionality closed source, right?

> Been hearing that literally for years - keep committing to it and
> regretting doing so. I bring up the Android phone because I got one for the
> first time recently and it was such a delight how well it integrates and
> just works, a real eye opener. Started doing development with it - again a
> delight, excellent documentation, excellent examples, excellent tutorials.
> Setting up the dev environment is a cinch. I've tried hacking kdepim - just
> getting a dev environment setup is a PITA. The documentation on akonadi is
> a joke - incomplete and inaccurate. API's are inconsistent and error
> handling/reporting is poor. To much dev knowledge is institutional and
> hidden.

Hm, I had my grievances with Android SDK, particularly trying it out
for groupware functionality. I find the KDE development environment
far better designed, and generally well documented. If you want to
learn state-of-the-art application programming with C++, I can think
of no better place to do that than with KDE. When it comes to the
Akonadi documentation, sure it could be better. Personally, I cannot
bring myself to whine about it here, simply because I know that you
and I could have improved it quite dramatically by contributing to it
with about the same amount of energy we are now burning here on the
mailinglist with our ego-trip.

Cheers,
Del
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