[Kde-pim] Cleaning up obsolete features

[laurent Montel]

Le Friday 31 July 2015, 23:16:15 Volker Krause a écrit :
> On Friday 31 July 2015 22:38:42 laurent Montel wrote:
> > Le Friday 31 July 2015, 19:26:24 Volker Krause a écrit :
> > > Hi,
> > > 
> > > over the past 19 years KMail has accumulated a few features that have
> > > been
> > > needed and useful at some point, but have become obsolete for various
> > > reasons. They clutter the UI and increase the amount of code that has to
> > > be
> > > maintained. At the PIM meeting at Akademy we therefore discussed to be
> > > slightly more aggressive than so far in cleaning this up.
> > > 
> > > Examples of things that are already gone:
> > > - tip of the day (got out of fashion after the 90s)
> > > - local sendmail support (not shipped/installed by modern distros)
> > > - system speaker beep notifications (dysfunctional with semi-recent
> > > hardware)
> > > 
> > > Here's a few more ideas:
> > > - application-local network proxy settings, seems of questionable value
> > > with most network I/O actually happening elsewhere. System proxy
> > > settings
> > > should cover this.
> > > - there's 5 checkboxes to enable different Outlook/Exchange
> > > compatibility
> > > aspects of iTip messages. If that's needed at all nowadays, there should
> > > be
> > > just one.
> > 
> > Indeed.
> > 
> > > - configurable host name for SMTP, even changeable per identity??
> > 
> > It was ask from user.
> > 
> > > - external composer editor support
> > 
> > It's unit tested.
> > So why remove it ?
> > 
> > > - customizable Message-Id prefix
> > > - show user agent in fancy header option, if you really care about that,
> > > look at the message source. Same for the "all headers" header style.
> > > 
> > > More ideas? Objections? :)
> > 
> > Objections of course.
> > I don't see why we need to remove feature which works ?
> > 
> > How we will explain to user that we removed features ?
> > 
> > I don't understand idea to remove feature which works ?
> 
> The tip of the day feature also did work, still I think it made no sense to
> keep that ;)

Yep but it was not changed from long time and it was an obsolete technology 
(and as you wrote it was just used by kontact). So ok for removing it.



> It's not about removing things that work and are used. It's about not
> wasting time on maintaining stuff that doesn't.

How will you define that this specific feature is not used ?

I am ok to remove obsolete technology or technology which doesn't work with 
actual hardware as beep feature.

But removing code as ' "all headers" header style ' will not cleanup code or 
makes it easy to maintain kmail.
It's just a little class in messageviewer.
If you want to reduce code we need to remove all style so ok we will reduce 
code so it makes sense to reduce code (but it doesn't make sense to do it :) )


But for me the real problem is not to reduce code, but perhaps be able to have 
more developers and we need to have developer will work during all the year 
and not just during sprint or akademy.

Because if we remove some part of code but we don't have more developer I 
don't see how it will improve situation no ?

To improve the situation we need real maintainer for several part of code for 
example for all resources because for the moment as we have a lot of part of 
code which are not maintaining.
I read a lot of bug report about kmail but it's not kmail but some bugs in 
resources for example.

Removing codes can be sense sometime but if nobody fixes existing bug it will 
not improve the situation.


Regards


> Not everything that once
> solved a problem still does that nowadays, that's the things I want to
> identify. Don't worry, I'm certainly not going to remove anything you want
> to keep :)
> > If you want a light kmail perhaps you can create a new application based
> > on
> > kdepim component no ?
> 
> Runtime cost is not the motivation here, maintenance cost is, so a second
> application would make it worse.
> 
> regards,
> Volker
> 
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-- 
Laurent Montel | laurent.montel at kdab.com | KDE/Qt Senior Software Engineer
KDAB (France) S.A.S., a KDAB Group company
Tel. France +33 (0)4 90 84 08 53,  http://www.kdab.fr


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