[Kde-pim] PIM Sprint report: Akonadi Next

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Thursday, November 27, 2014 13.41:38 Marco Martin wrote:
> * calendar: holidays (libkholidays)

As John noted, we can provide this almost immediately. Huzzah!d

> * calendar: appointments from akonadi in common with korganizer

How important is this on a scale of 1 to 10 where 1 is "nobody even uses this 
feature" to 10 which is "it is a critical part of the daily workflow for a 
large percentage of users"?

I would personally put it at 3 or maybe a 4, as it is only useful to the 
subset of users who:

* use Plasma
* also use KOrganizer (not just Kontact)
* keep this feature on in Plasma (many turn it off due to resource usage at 
startup)

Even for those people it is probably not a core part of their daily workflow. 
I use this feature quite a bit myself when scheduling with people, and even I 
wouldn't call it part of my core daily workflow.

If this is why people are pushing on KDE PIM to make a release, perhaps we 
should reconsider as it just isn't that important a feature. It is certainly a 
*nice* feature and quite handy, but is not having it worth adjusting KDE PIM 
priorities for? Would it be better to allow KDE PIM to chart the future of 
Akonadi in a way that makes sense for Kontact first and foremost?

To be perfectly frank, KDE PIM does not currently have the resources to 
service more than KDE PIM right now. The goal is to change that by growing the 
community, but that hinges in part on getting progress on the new storage 
layer.

(Akonadi is currently a significant blocker to getting new people involved 
with KDE PIM due to its current level of complexity ...)

> * accessing the body of new emails arriving for some extended notification
> thing.. that would be more optional/in the future

So we can ignore this one for now, yes?

(BTW: there is also krunner integration ... another feature I regularly use, 
but .. yeah .. probably even lower on the 10-point scale than events-in-
plasma-calendar)

> The only realistic way to avoid that i can think of tough is using some kind
> of bridge between plasma5/kf5 apps and an old akonadi instance.
> what maintenance this in turn causes I don't know, for you guys to assess

One could use the Qt4 akonadi .. it is in quite reasonable shape now, so it 
probably does not require a resources commitment if Plasma 5 were to start 
using it.

> So i guess kdepim libraries would be released one by one and then after
> those are stable a kf5 based contact would come?

Still to be decided; but I would not be surprised if there was a bunch of 
libraries released right away that don't depend on Akonadi which are already 
useful and usable, with others then being released over time. But that's just 
a guess. A proper plan needs to be drawn up.

> so for instance for the calendar, could there be a kf5 based library that
> accesses the calendar from the running akonadi that the old kontact is
> using?

Yes, this is possible. The question is who is going to write and maintain it.

Given that there is a port to Qt5 / Frameworks 5 already done it's first 
phase[1] one would in theory cherry pick the pieces from there that are needed 
to get calendar data and turn that into a library. The IMAP based protocol of 
akonadi nor its DBus interfaces haven't changed, so this should be equally 
usable against a Qt4 or a Qt5 akonadi.

Who knows, maybe someone could convince Laurent to whip up such a thing? He's 
a magician like that ... :)

[1] it builds, basically runs, more work needed to get rid of kde4support 
usage and iron out any bugs that may have resulted in ported

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
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