KDEPIM 4.6 prob^Wimpressions

[Kevin Krammer]

On Tuesday, 2011-07-19, Alex Schuster wrote:

> I waited for over a year until I started filing the first KDE4 bug. There
> were so many, and I thought filing them would not be necessary, as the KDE
> developers just have to start the applications for themselves and then
> they'll see.

Unfortunately that isn't as clear cut in reality as it is in theory.
Any software with higher complexity than hello world has lots of different 
code paths, each potentially changing the internal state of the application or 
stored data it works on.
Running into each combination of paths by incidence (aka "just start the 
application") is extremely unlikely (winning the lottery is probably more 
likely than that).

Anyone working in software engineering has had bugs that get reported 
repeatedly but it takes some specific detail in one report to actually get it 
reproducible for the person trying to solve it.

And that it is just for the functionality provided by the application or a 
library shipped with it, not counting any kind of differences that might be 
caused by an external dependency or a modification the entity building the 
software.

I know KDE developers who run their git master checkout as their main 
environment, but their workflows or surrounding setups are often very 
different from those of non-developers.

For example several KDE PIM developers have been using KMail2 for somewhat 
between one and two years now, at least one even as a native Mac OS X apps.
But none of them are using POP3 and several are using the same IMAP server 
software.

I always find it both fascinating but also demoralising how many things get 
discovered even during beta periods which only a few people participate in.
Fascinating because one often cannot imagine (inspite of experience telling 
otherwise) that some often exercised code could lead to a different outcome 
than those known.

> I understand this. That's why I prefer usenet much over web forums, at
> least for things that are mostly text-only. The web is fast these days,
> but I hate latencies when clicking through messages. Oh, and I have to
> click, while navigation by keyboard is more practical.

Indeed.
It is a pity that none of the common web forum software packages has a built-
in news gateway.

> > There's that inevitable feel to it, for sure...  What got me was how
> > blase' all the kde folks seemed to be to glaring konqueror issues like no
> > proper ssl/tls certificate management, while all the while calling it
> > ready for ordinary use.
> 
> Indeed, ready for use means to me I could do online banking with it.

Hmm, I always do online banking with Konqueror. Have done so for years.

> I'm using rdiff-backup, and I back up all my ~/.* files regularly. At least
> every time before I save the session. takes a while now, because I have
> nearly 2G in my .kde4/share/apps/kmail/dimap folder. Seems KMail (or
> Akonadi) downloaded everything from my IMAP server, I didn't expect that.

KMail.
Account type "Disconnected IMAP" basically works by two-way synchronizing a 
local copy of IMAP folders with the server, thus allowing offline 
(disconnected) access to the data.
This was originally mainly necessary for working with IMAP based groupware 
servers such as Kolab, to ensure addressbook and calendar entries could be 
accessed quickly without needing to wait for the IMAP server to respond.

Cheers,
Kevin
-- 
Kevin Krammer, KDE developer, xdg-utils developer
KDE user support, developer mentoring
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