[Kde-pim] Advertising Akonadi to developers and geeks

[Kevin Krammer]

On Thursday, 2013-04-18, Thomas Koch wrote:
> During the KDE-PIM spring meeting 2012 in Osnabrück, Bernhard said that you
> should not talk about Akonadi to end users. - This might be right.
> 
> But given my dissappointing experience with 4.10.2 so far, I'd like to ask
> you to rethink this policy with regard to power users and developers.

It is definitely still a topic for developers, it is one of the major 
infrastructure projects KDE people contribute to.

The intent is to now use the name in user visible strings or documentation but 
instead focus on clients and capabitlites.

> At the same meeting, I asked whether there is some kind of commandline or
> scriptable interface to Akonadi. The answer was that I should not want
> this. period.

Not sure who you talked to but this is most likely a misunderstanding.

We do have command line interfaces for the old contact and calendar system 
(kabclient and konsolekalendar respectively) and even if those get ported to 
Akonadi at some point some people might still want to implement one for mail, 
etc.

As a matter of fact, I've started working on a generic client here:
http://quickgit.kde.org/?p=scratch%2Fkrake%2Fakonadiclient.git
As you can see not much development going on due to lack of time :(

> I'm still convinced about the general idea of having a daemon process doing
> the synchronisation and client apps that don't need to understand each and
> every protocol.

Exactly!

> I believe that Akonadi would really benefit if more people would write
> clients using Akonadi.

It would. This is already happening in the field of resource clients, many of 
those are from people who did not have any prior involvement with KDE PIM.

> But googling for Akonadi only reveals rather old or
> more general pages about Akonadi, - or rants about akonadi and
> explanations how to disable this "resource hog".

Well, that's the result of our open discussion culture which does or did not 
distinguish between developers and users so people who did not understand 
goals or decisions focused on things they thought were relevant.

Nothing to do about that short of closing down developer communication and we 
don't want to do that, do we? :)

> So people are talking (writing) about Akonadi anyways (google for it!) but
> not at all in a good way. You might rather start talking about it instead
> of leaving the first google ranks to rants.

Nice idea in theory but this just doesn't scale. Rants can be written by way 
more people and take less effort to write than high quality information 
pieces.
Since search engines do not know about the quality of indexed material, 
quantity will win.

> I've found the Akonadi API documentation and the Techbase site
> http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/PIM/Akonadi
> 
> I'd like to encourage you to also target people that might be interested to
> use Akonadi directly for their own projects without developing Akonadi
> itself. There is not much documentation for this audience nor blogposts or
> conference talks.

Akonadi developers have been giving developer oriented talks for years, we've 
written tons of blog postings, etc.

Part of the problem with the latter is that blogs are also read by non-
developers, who then very often get confused about things written and reach 
all kinds of wrong conclusions that are then almost impossible to combat.

This then leads to often unwarranted bad reputation of the service, in turn 
leading to developers avoiding it to not be harmed by association.

Therefore the idea to not use the respective names at all in text read by 
users so we can hopefully reclaim it as a neutral development topic.

Anyway, people are of course welcome to try pushing for a better image, e.g. 
by writing blog posts about impressive new or improved ways of doing stuff due 
to some program(s) delegating work to Akonadi.

Cheers,
Kevin
-- 
Kevin Krammer, KDE developer, xdg-utils developer
KDE user support, developer mentoring
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