KDEPIM 4.6 prob^Wimpressions

[Alex Schuster]

Kevin Krammer writes:

> 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.

I understand this, I'm also developing software, and I wished it had fewer 
bugs. But in KDE I see many bugs that look like things were not tested at 
all.

An example is the bug in 4.6.3 I think when Konqueror send inputs to forms 
twice. Such bus just should not make it into a release, even KDE's bugzilla 
complained about duplicate edits when filing a bug.

Or KSnapshot, that has a Send to... button, but when you actually use it to 
open your screenshot in an application like Gimp or Gwenview, you got a file 
not found error because the number in the name has been increased by one. 
It's a known bug that has been fixed already, but I wonder how this could 
make it undetected into a release. 

Or when you open a zip file with Ark and drag a file somewhere, Ark always 
opens a dolphin window, displaying my $HOME directory, not the directory 
where I put the file into. I don't think this is how it is meant to be. 
Well, maybe Ark is deprecated now, as Dolphin deals with zip files nicely.

> 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.

Point taken. Guess I will report some more bugs, in case they are not 
reported yet and do not always happen.

> > 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.

I wonder why. Maybe because of things like BBCode that would make trouble 
for text-only newsreaders?

> > > 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 always get warnings about untrusted certificates. I must admit I do not 
know much about this area (Duncan does), and when I view the certificate it 
is said to be trustable, but I feel better using another browser that does 
not complain about certificates.

Now that I found out how to activate Webkit instead of KHTML, I'm using 
Konqueror more often again. It's still my favorite browser, but it made lots 
of trouble in the past. I really like the 'File -> Open with' menu, so it's 
easy to quickly open a page in another browser.


> > 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.

Ah! I used disconnected IMAP after you gave me the tip a little while ago, 
and it helped. Now that I look into the dimap directory, all files have a 
date of 2011-06-13, that's when I upgraded KDEPIM. So it looks like it is 
not being used any more, AKonadi is not to blame, and I can delete it.

	Wonko
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