[Kde-pim] Akonadi as metadata caching middleware

[Martin Steigerwald]

Am Donnerstag, 12. April 2012 schrieb Lindsay Mathieson:
> > Assuming however that ordinary users do at least some of these
> > things, Akonadi
> > or something like it was inevitable.
> 
> I disagree strongly - a centralized middle man to sync all these things
> sounds great in theory, but in practice its turned out to be an over
> engineered mess with far to many fragile components, any one of which
> can break the whole chain. And no one seems to have a clear overview.

The approach Akonadi takes is in use by quite some groupware solutions 
already. At work we have Zimbra. And guess what, they use MySQL to hold 
metadata for mail. And they use Lucene to index them.

And it works.

And it scales.

It really scales.

I have a nice little folder in there. >320000 mails. Linux Kernel 
mailinglist. I click on it in the web interface and get displayed the most 
recent of them in a few seconds usually.

I type in some search keywords and get results from full text indexing 
that takes place in the background in about 10-15 seconds at maximum, 
often quicker. Full text and way more than these >320000 mails in about 
easily 100 folders.

Try any of these with KDEPIM 4.4.5… When I try to access that folder 
within KMail from KDEPIM 4.4.5 I loose the patience to wait. Really. 
Searching in all mails and their contents? Forget it.

Sure, they trick it. They just show the first 1000 mails or so and only 
when I scroll down with the slider I get more, but almost immediately. I 
think this incremental approach of displaying folder contents would be a 
really cool feature for KMail 2. And it should be doable given that I can 
ask the database for the most recent entries easily. And frankly, why 
should I need to see all >320000 mails at once?

Now KDEPIM 2 isn´t there yet, but from the technology involved I see no 
reason, why it can´t get there. And why it as Georg envisions can not even 
have a server component that ideally at some time in the future I could 
apt-get install onto my server and be done with it.

Thus using a database for storing mail, contact and calendar metadata 
sounds like a perfectly sane approach to me.

Using an indexing software like Lucene or Nepomuk for mails also sounds 
like a perfectly sane approach to me.

I bet KDEPIM 2 will kick ass. Seriously. It just will take some more time.

And from what I read it is used on mobile phones already. So I also 
believe that resource consumption can be tuned so that its suitable for 
desktops as well.

I am still reluctant to upgrade for now. Well Debian KDE/Qt developers 
still did not package it anyway. But I am more and more interested to use 
some virtual machine or additional KDEPIM installation to try it out.  At 
first maybe with a duplicating mail account on my server.

I am just not decided as too which live image to use - are there any 
recommendations for a most recent KDEPIM 2?

Ciao,
-- 
Martin 'Helios' Steigerwald - http://www.Lichtvoll.de
GPG: 03B0 0D6C 0040 0710 4AFA  B82F 991B EAAC A599 84C7
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