[Kde-pim] GNOME/Evolution moving toward email as a service

[Kevin Krammer]

On Thursday, 2013-08-15, Mark wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 15, 2013 at 5:49 PM, Kevin Krammer <krammer at kde.org> wrote:
> > Hi PIMsters,
> > 
> > some of you might have already seen it, GNOME/Evolution is working
> > towards email as a desktop session service :)
> > 
> > http://www.superlectures.com/guadec2013/evolution-as-email-service-for-th
> > e- gnome-desktop
> > (you can use "Switch camera" to have it only display the projector
> > recording)
> > 
> > Quite some Deja Vue for anyone working on KDEPIM of course, their goals
> > even include separation of Evolution components into reusable libraries.
> > 
> > Still nice to see that our approach is being valdiated by the only other
> > fully featured FOSS groupware client project :)

> I don't understand them (gnome in general). What they want is akonadi!
> Why don't they use that instead? Are they afraid of C++? Afraid of Qt?
> It would be so extremely beneficial for both GNOME and KDE to work
> together on akonadi.
> 
> I guess they suffer from the NIH[1] syndrome.

It is a bit more complicated than that.

GNOME has had a service based approach for addressbook and calendar a lot 
longer than we have Akonadi.
The system came also out of Evolution and is called the Evolution Data Server 
or EDS.
Email access, on the other hand, was directly implemented in client apps, 
though they often shared a library called Camel.

EDS was originally using CORBA for client/service commication but has been 
ported to D-Bus a couple of years ago.

One can think of Akonadi as a second generation implementation of a PIM data 
service, taking it to a new level (e.g. being data type agnostic, using local 
socket for high througput data transfer, etc).

For contacts and calendar they are in a "works for me" kind of situation that 
didn't require any change.

Of course sharing common components could still be benefitial. KDE did switch 
from in "works for me" situation to a common next generation technology, even 
when it incurred porting costs/pains (DCOP -> D-Bus).
 
But GNOME is a lot more burdended with politics, mostly due to substantially 
tighter corporate influence, making it difficult to strive for more idealistic 
goals like increased interoperability.

All attempts from our side so far to make Akonadi more palatable have failed.
For example we had secured a KDE GSoC slot to create a GObject based client 
library for Akonadi but didn't get a single student application for that idea.

Anyway, not our problem. It is just interesting to see that they are have 
still pursiing the goal of email in EDS inspite of only slowly moving ahead 
for several years already. Determined bunch of people those Evolution hackers 
;)

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