The KDEPIM / Akonadi situation

[Martin Steigerwald]

Hi!

As it is important to be fair and open what could have been a effect of 
an unusual combination of software versions in Debian at that time:

Martin Steigerwald - 11.06.20, 11:50:53 CEST:
> Another community goal aside from fixing up the chat software
> situation within KDE could be to either fix Akonadi or replace it by
> something that works…
[…]
> Frustrating to use KMail with Akonadi 5.14.1 (20.04)
> 
> https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kdepim-users/2020-June/013315.html

What was the most frustrating about all of this was a regression with 
Akonadi 20.04 in Debian back then:

[Akonadi] [Bug 422336] kmail: the access and reading of the received
messages is often very slow

https://bugs.kde.org/422336

I still do not know what caused it and how it got fixed. But with Qt 
5.14.2 (instead of the former Qt 5.12 in Debian) and probably other 
updates in Debian this regression is gone.

Synchronizing mail folders is much, much faster again. To the extent 
that despite all the other issues that are still unreleased KMail is 
basically usable again.

Thanks to everyone who may have been involved in the fix. Maybe… it was 
that Akonadi 20.04 did not like Qt 5.12 or maybe it was whatever… I am 
not sure what the Qt minimum version for Akonadi 20.04 is… but I would 
bet that our Debian packagers respected it.

I did not follow up on recent mails on the thread, cause I had the 
impression that my initial mail did not achieve what I intended to 
achieve with it – except for one guy offering to help development of 
KDEPIM and Akonadi! Well which is quite something… if I consider it! 
Also while I still think "akonadictl fsck" is a thing a user should 
never have to deal with… – no Outlook is not a reference for me and 
Evolution, Thunderbird and others do not have anything like that as far 
as I am aware, also Firefox does not have it for its countless SQLite 
databases, … – it is only one aspect of what I brought up and I saw no 
benefit in discussing that out to the end.

The other issues I mentioned remain, but are not as severe now that the 
dire performance regression has disappeared.


I remain with the best wishes for the KDEPIM team and hope that some day 
even those who felt hurt after reading my mail can understand that in no 
way I meant it personal. What I was going for was to find ways to support 
the KDEPIM project, but it appears that the frustration I experienced 
did not really help to achieve that goal.

So if there are any hurt feelings left… I apologize. It was never my 
intention to hurt anyone.

That all written I also stand with my assertion that the other issues I 
mentioned are all still there and the KDEPIM project IMHO can really 
benefit from some community support or setting improving it as a goal on 
the next goal round. I also still assert that no mail of mine in this 
thread has been disrespectful to the KDEPIM developers.

Maybe one day there can be a constructive discussion about how to 
support the KDEPIM project. For now I let it sit as it is.

Best,
-- 
Martin