January/February KDE PIM summary blog post

Tue Mar 7 17:27:41 GMT 2023

Thanks for all the input! Below is a draft for review, intended to be 
published tomorrow.

Regards,
Volker

---
title: January/February in KDE PIM
date: 2023-03-08 10:00:00 +0100
---

Here's the usual bi-monthly update from KDE's personal information management 
applications team. Since [the last report]({ site.baseurl }}{% link _posts/
2023-01-07-kde-pim-november-december-2022.md %}) 25 people contributed about 
1300 code changes, focusing on bugfixes and infrastructure improvements for the 
22.12 maintenance releases as well as preparing for the transition to Qt 6.

### Upcoming KDE PIM Sprint

We'll finally have an [in-person sprint](https://community.kde.org/Sprints/PIM/
2023) again, after the last one planned for April 2020 fell victim to the 
pandemic. The sprint will be held in Toulouse, on April 1st/2nd.

### Qt 6 transition

With the first release on top of Qt 6 and KDE Frameworks 6 expected for later 
this year, a lot of work again went into preparing for that. Many parts are 
meanwhile largely working and usable in a Qt 6 build already. The install 
layout has also been adjusted to allow PIM components from both a Qt 5 and a 
Qt 6 to co-exist, which is especially relevant for the more widely used 
libraries.

### Text input and understanding

The work for extracting and generalizing text input and text understanding 
features such as auto-correction, grammar checking, machine translation and 
text-to-speech output has resulted in the new [KTextAddons](https://
invent.kde.org/libraries/ktextaddons) library. That's meanwhile used instead 
all over KDE PIM replacing previous application-specific implementations, and 
is intended to move under the KDE Frameworks umbrella.

### Google contacts and calendar access

After a huge amount of work starting over a year ago, Google contacts are once 
again working in PIM apps thanks to two MRs that have now been merged:

- [Replace support for Google's deprecated Contacts API with Google's People 
API](https://invent.kde.org/pim/libkgapi/-/merge_requests/22[9])
- [Replace use of Google Contacts in Google Groupware with new Google People 
API](https://invent.kde.org/pim/kdepim-runtime/-/merge_requests/98[10])

Support for the old Google Contacts API has been dropped and replaced with a 
new Google contacts implementation that uses the Google People API. This means 
one can now add, edit, and delete contacts as expected.

{% include figure.html filename="/assets/posts/140/kalendar-contact-view.png"
    caption="Google contacts available in Kalendar again."
    alternative_text="Kalendar contact view showing contacts from a Google 
account."
%}

Additionally, a bug preventing the deletion of Google items (i.e. contacts, 
tasks, calendar events, etc.) has been fixed and this should now work as 
expected too.

### KMail

- Support Spamassassin 4.0.0 (bug 464973).
- Fix crash on attempting to replay a message with an user template (bug 
463935).
- Fix some embedded images not being displayed (bug 464404).

### Kalendar

We have been mainly focusing on behind-the-scenes improvements over the past 
few months. Part of this has been preparing for the Qt 6 transition, which is 
still underway.

On top of this, we have been focusing on bug fixes. Several parts of Kalendar 
-- mainly the event, task, and contact editors, but others as well -- are more 
polished and less crash-prone.

- [Do not require leading "0" for hours while creating event](https://
invent.kde.org/pim/kalendar/-/commit/11e9cdeca165e3833e65b0669997aa7146264c65)
- [Show the previous searched text on reopening command bar](https://
invent.kde.org/pim/kalendar/-/commit/70c78e4f203d0b7395469b3281691ebf99f1c252)
- [Fix handling of tasks with no priority when sorting tasks by priority]
(https://invent.kde.org/pim/kalendar/-/commit/
7a843719cb63d2b7e7913793fdf08a3ff33825fb)
- [Fixed Create button not working ](https://invent.kde.org/pim/kalendar/-/
commit/4eb6e0fd851b49a45758d1e1e092afc6c407198b)
- [Fix loading contact editor](https://invent.kde.org/pim/kalendar/-/commit/
65302ac5aefce6bc4cfc685019953d933a7712b2)
- [Fix potential crash on startup](https://invent.kde.org/pim/kalendar/-/
commit/6858a2b1c7188cda288efcdaa772c7cbb05b9282)
- [Fix number of days](https://invent.kde.org/pim/kalendar/-/commit/
59676d532cd3e21e89fb0a2296a399fc39c4c878)

A new contributor, Vanshpreet, has contributed a new feature -- the ability to 
set event and task reminders at custom times. This should make it easier to 
notify yourself about important things just when you need to.

- [Allow setting reminders at custom times](https://invent.kde.org/pim/
kalendar/-/commit/593bb9804a931995f45913c02fd89a7d5d060d3b)

{% include figure.html filename="/assets/posts/140/kalendar-event-editor.png"
    caption="Custom event reminders in Kalendar."
    alternative_text="Kalendar event editor allowing custom times for 
reminders."
%}

We have also proposed several Google Summer of Code projects and there seems 
to be a lot of interest in them, which is good. Some aspiring students have 
even submitted patches, which is even better!

### KOrganizer

* Allow to create an event with range selected in date navigator (bug 226950).
* Fix crash when applying status to an empty participant (bug 462176).

### Kleopatra

* Multiple files with certificates are now imported one after the other instead
of concurrently. This makes it easier to figure out for which file one has
entered the wrong passphrase and avoids problems with concurrent modification
of the certificate storage. ([T6323](https://dev.gnupg.org/T6323))
* If a compliance mode is active, then Kleopatra now offers only compliant
algorithms when creating new OpenPGP certificates or S/MIME CSRs. ([T6325]
(https://dev.gnupg.org/T6325))
* Kleopatra now uses gpgtar instead of gpg combined with tar, when creating or
decrypting encrypted archives. This should speed up the creation or decryption
of large encrypted archives on Windows. ([T5478](https://dev.gnupg.org/T5478))
* The users can now give a different file name if after the completion of a
signing and/or encryption operation Kleopatra detects that there is already a
file with the original file name of the signing/encryption result. Previously,
the users could only choose to overwrite the existing file or to cancel the
operation. ([T6372](https://dev.gnupg.org/T6372))

{% include figure.html filename="/assets/posts/140/kleopatra-T6372.png"
    caption="Dialog to handle result files with the same name already 
existing."
    alternative_text="Screenshot of a Kleopatra dialog shown when result files 
with the same name already exist."
%}

### KAddressbook

- Fix untrimmed URLs added to a contact getting dropped (bug 465669).

### Itinerary

[Itinerary](https://apps.kde.org/itinerary) has seen many improvements to its 
event support and got infrastructure to use onboard API on trains, to name 
just to of the many changes.
See [its own summary blog post]({{ site.baseurl }}{% link _posts/2023-02-03-
kde-itinerary-december-january-2023.md %})
for more details.

{% include figure.html filename="/assets/posts/137/kde-itinerary-onboard-live-
status.jpg"
    caption="Onboard live status showing the current position, speed, heading 
and journey."
    alternative_text="Two screenshots showing a map with the current train 
position, speed and heading, and a schematic display of the journey with 
delays."
%}

### Akregator

- Fix RSS feed logos being incorrectly scaled by title height (bug 465960).

### Help us make KDE PIM even better!

Take a look at some of the junior jobs that we have! They are simple, mostly 
programming tasks that don’t require any deep knowledge or understanding of 
the code, so anyone can work on them. Feel free to pick any task from the list 
and reach out to us by [email](https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-pim),
[Matrix #kontact:kde.org](https://community.kde.org/Matrix) or IRC 
#kontact:libera.chat!
We’ll be happy to guide you and answer all your questions.
[Read more here…](https://www.dvratil.cz/2018/08/kde-pim-junior-jobs-are-opened)
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