KDE PIM mentorship request

[Daniel Vrátil]

On Sunday, 14 June 2020 22:33:05 CEST Ihor Antonov wrote:
> Hi KDE Developers.

Hi Ihor!

I'm Daniel, one of the PIM devs mostly active around Akonadi.

> 
> The recent thread about Akonadi/PIM situation triggered me to write this
> email.With this email I want to introduce myself and offer my time to make
> KDE PIM better.
> 
> I am a huge fan of KDE PIM applications and I use them daily. There are
> plenty of rough edges but I still like it more than Thunderbird or
> Evolution.
> 
> I am 100% on board with the statement that more eyes/hands are needed to
> make software better. No software is perfect, software is never finished,
> and it needs constant love and attention.
> 
> I want to start contributing to KDE PIM, but I don't know where to start as
> the PIM ecosystem is just too large to fit into my head in one evening.
> I have a bunch of personal itches that I'd like to scratch, also I'd like to
> understand Akonadi situation over time with hope to be able to improve it
> afterwards. Nothing good happens overnight though.

Thanks for stepping up! There's plenty of things to do and another pair of 
hands always helps :)

> 
> I am Systems Engineer (Devops/Sysadmin) with some background in programming
> (Go, Scala, Rust, Python). I am not a C++ expert but I learn languages
> quickly (back like 10 years ago I had some exposure to Qt but it was soo
> long ago). Things like CI/CD, Jenkins, Gitlab are things I work with on
> daily basis. I want to devote my evenings and weekends to free software.
> 
> In order for me to get effective and start contributing I need some hand-
> holding/mentoring for the initial onboarding period. Basically I need
> someone to guide me through the series of small tasks, and help me navigate
> the complexity of the ecosystem (often I simply don't know in what
> library/repo the relevant code is) Unfortunately I don't know who is the
> right person to ask this so this is why I send this to the whole mailing
> list.

As Martin already said, the best place is this mailing list and #akonadi or 
#kontact channel on IRC. 

The best course of action is to get the entire KDE PIM built from current 
master into a prefix. kdesrc-build is the best tool for this, see the 
Development page on our wiki [0].

[0] https://community.kde.org/KDE_PIM/Development

Then you can start playing around with it :)


> So here are the list of my personal itches that may be a good starting
> point:
> 
> - kmail message list: add option "send new email to the recipient of
> currently selected email"

Sounds like a nice feature, shouldn't be too hard, of all it is in more or 
less one place in kmail.git

> - kmail folders list: show number of messages marked as important, or marked
> as action item next to number of unread

Sounds useful, although this will be a bit more difficult to implement. It 
requires extending Akonadi to be able to provide this information in addition 
to the total/unread count and keep it up to date.

If you want to get more deeply familiar with Akonadi, this might be a good 
task for you.

> - todo list: add possibility to re-parent a todo item

Ha, I thought we can already do that! But now I can see that this whole 
parenting stuff seems to be somewhat broken :) Lots of bugfixing ahead in this 
task :)

> - todo list: filter tasks with no assigned category

+1, should be fairly easy to do in korganizer.git

> - todo list: improve new category creation UI (it is terrible atm)

+1000 (although I touched it up a little recently). The categories are, in 
fact, Akonadi Tags, so any improvements in this area will benefit all PIM 
applications.

> - todo list: allow re-arranging columns so that priority column could be
> first 

I'd love to have this!

> - akregator: add congfiguration option to change the font of the list
> of articles (similar to kmail message list font)

Shouldn't be too difficult either.

> Some of the above issues may already be captured somewhere, I simply don't
> know where is the right place to search/report bugs for each one (there are
> over 70 repos!)

Once you get everything compiled and running, just pick one of the tasks 
you've listed above and start working on it. If you need any help, just feel 
free to ask. Someone from the team will gladly help you or point you in the 
right direction.

> 
> KDE community made an impression of welcoming and caring and I am looking
> forward to working with some of you!

So do we :) Thanks again for stepping up!

/Daniel

> 
> Thanks.


-- 
Daniel Vrátil
www.dvratil.cz | dvratil at kde.org
IRC: dvratil on Freenode (#kde, #kontact, #akonadi, #fedora-kde)

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