[Kde-pim] From a users point of view ....

[Will Stephenson]

On Sunday 26 Feb 2012 22:22:57 Christoph Bartoschek wrote:
> Starting with Opensuse 12.1 the new kmail version was shipped. I know two
> former kmail users that switched to thunderbird because of Opensuse's
> decision to use the new stuff. And I am afraid that the number gets
> significantly higher when we decide to upgrade our desktop machines.
>
> But can one blame Opensuse here? I think that it takes lots of effort to
> keep the old version. In addition there is the chicken-egg problem. Without
> the users that report bugs kdepim will never get in a usable state again.
> Obviously the KDE team decided that the new kmail version is good enough.
> So I can understand that Opensuse shipped it.

(with my openSUSE hat on)

I took the call to ship kdepim 4.7 with openSUSE 12.1.  This was because 1) 
upstream said it was ready, 2) the openSUSE KDE contributor team agreed, 3) 
upstream could not guarantee that fixes in kde[pim]libs 4.7 would work well 
with kdepim 4.4, 4) We did a lot of testing and fixes prior to release and 5) 
I'd previously offered kdepim 4.3 (legacy kaddressbook)  packages alongside 
the latest upstream, and nobody showed interest (or even said thanks).  

> In my opinion the problem is that the basic stuff does not work properly. If
> the advanced features were incomplete or buggy one could live with it. But
> when basic stuff is broken the new version feels like a big regression. I
> cannot resent that people abandon kmail2.

Agreed. In retrospect I would have shipped 4.4 again and taken my chances with 
regressions.  A lot of people inside SUSE abandoned kmail (and KDE, in some 
cases) after we shipped 12.1.  I am working on shipping 4.8.x as an online 
update to help with the worst cases, but am first tracking a severe CPU usage 
problem in Nepomuk's indexing of PIM data when 4.7 semantic data is upgraded.

Will
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