Munch munch munch

[Duncan]

Alex Schuster posted on Sun, 01 Apr 2012 19:08:08 +0200 as excerpted:

> And there was not much time between me moving the folder and KMail
> crashing, probably not enough to actually download 12,000 messages from
> my remote IMAP server to my local folders.
> I also checked on the IMAP server, there is no longer a Gentoo-User-2010
> directory.

That's bad.  Any sane app won't delete the source during a move, until it 
knows the destination is safely complete.  Unfortunately, there's a 
rather big question ATM as to whether the kdepim devs are sane... or to 
put it a bit less severely... whether they actually consider the fact 
that people depend on their tools, vs just using them as toys, no big 
deal if they screw up.

I had thus assumed that kmail/akonadi would have been sane enough not to 
delete from the IMAP server until the messages had actually been copied 
to local disk, even if the database indexing it got screwed.  
Unfortunately, that doesn't appear to be the case.  Oh, well...  Just 
more reason to get off kmail/akonadi if you actually rely on mail not 
disappearing unless you actually delete it, I guess.

>> However, it was exactly that sort of games with my mail that I had had
>> enough of when I switched to claws-mail.

... Even more so if they're deleting from the remote when moving to 
local, before the local copy is known to be safely stored away.

> BTW, there is no function to just move on to the next unread mail,
> wherever it is, or is there? I can move to the next unread mail of the
> current folder, and I can move to the next unread folder. No big deal,
> but somewhat inconvenient. In Claws I just press the space bar,
> advancing from page to page, from mail to next unread mail, from folder
> to next unread folder.

I wouldn't know, as that doesn't match my usage pattern at all.  I 
routinely deliberately leave messages marked unread, to come back to 
later.  So when I'm done in a folder, I'll move to another SPECIFIC 
folder, not simply the next one with unread messages.  And when I'm done 
with a message, I'll often move to another SPECIFIC (by title or author 
or whatever) message, as well, not just the next message or next unread.

So when there's hotkeys for next unread and next unread folder, I tend to 
immediately unmap them, both to free up the hotkeys for use with other 
functionality, and to avoid hitting it accidentally.  Or sometimes I keep 
them mapped, but to a rather more involved hotkey sequence.

> Maybe I should move away from KDE apps. Use Claws or Thunderbird instead
> of KMail. Liferea instead of Akregator which makes Kontact crash several
> times a day. Something else instead of KNode which often forgets which
> articles I have read already. Although I'd miss things like the adress
> book, and things being integrated.
> Konqeror also crashes too often, but it's still my default browser.

FWIW, that's what I've noticed my trend to be here, away from kde apps.  
Claws for mail instead of the akonadified kmail.  A second, separately 
configured claws instance for feeds (where you're using liferea), as last 
I knew, akregator wasn't akonadified yet but being kdepim, it's only a 
matter of time, and besides, it was still pulling in akonadi due to it 
pulling in kdepim-common-libs, which in turn pulled in akonadi.  (And 
that of course forced semantic-desktop for kdelibs, which due to gentoo/
kde's stupid = deps that should be ? deps, forces everything ELSE to 
semantic-desktop as well.  Fortunately, gentoo/kde is looking at changing 
that soon, but...)

I've never used knode, except very occasionally when trying a second news 
client for troubleshooting, as pan has always been better, particularly 
for binaries (tho it could only post text until earlier this year, and 
it's still a git-only feature).  But it's kdepim as well, so if I had 
been using it, you can bet I'd not be now, as the gray akonadi goo will 
be assimilating it as well, eventually.

I rather reluctantly finally switched to firefox as my default browser, 
when it became obvious from bugs, including no GUI security certificate 
handling for YEARS after kde4 including konqueror was declared ready for 
ordinary users, in an era when whole certificate agencies are getting 
compromised and need turned off, that the kde/konqueror devs consider it 
no more than a toy.

But I do my online BANKING with my browser!  So "simply a toy" was NOT 
GOOD ENOUGH for a browser declared fit for ordinary use!

Actually, that was simply the last straw.  I had been leaning more and 
more toward firefox already, as there's simply nothing like noscript in 
konqueror, nor could I reasonably expect such an extension to ever 
appear, as konqueror simply doesn't have the necessary mindshare to build 
a viable extension community.  These days, request-policy is another 
extension I'd be hard-pressed to do without, and there are several others 
I use but that I'd trade for better kde integration, if I could get it in 
anything but a "toy" browser.


Back in the kde 3.5 era, all I needed was a decent qt-based news app to 
replace pan, and I'd have been able to get gtk off my system entirely.  
Now, firefox and claws are gtk based as well, and I'm beginning to wonder 
if ultimately, I'll switch to enlightenment or some such, and it'll be kde 
coming off the system instead.  I still really like kde as a desktop, 
*ESPECIALLY* now that I have USE=-semantic-desktop set and get the faster 
speed AND all the fancy plasma desktop plasmoids and kwin effects, but 
back on kde 3.5, if you'd have told me that I'd be dropping kmail, 
akregator, konqueror, etc, I'd have said not very likely, and that 
happened.  Now I really DO have more invested in gtk than in qt/kde, and 
it really WOULD be easier to drop kde than to drop gtk.  Oh, well...

> And Plasma... it's acting weird so often. Yes, I could try to start with
> a fresh install, but I do not want to do this once per year, with many
> things still not working after that. At least that's the experiences
> from the past. And it takes much time to re-configure all as I like it.
> Now I'll dig through my .kde4 backups, let's see if I can make plasma
> work again.

I've often wondered about your setup, and why, both of us on gentoo, you 
seem to have so many more problems than I do.  FWIW, plasma has been very 
stable for me, since some problems back in the 4.6.2 and 4.6.3 era.

Part of it now is almost certainly that I'm running a much less complex 
kde, now that I'm built without the semantic-desktop stuff entirely, or 
very close to it.  But even when I was still running that, I had less 
problems than you seem to.

For plasma, it's also possible that by 4.5 or so, I had come up with a 
plasma desktop arrangement I liked and that was stable, and I've made 
very few changes to it since.  Plus, only the single activity, no 
switching, and the same setup on all four desktops, not a different config 
for each, seriously reducing complexity and memory/resource usage both.

Oh, one other possible user-level factor...  I've removed nearly all the 
sysmon type plasmoids I had installed, and run a rather complex 
superkaramba theme now, in its place.  While plasma supposedly supports 
superkaramba themes, there's certainly either some bug or some gap in the 
documentation, as I've never been able to get it to run my own, only 
various ones that I downloaded from kdelook, to use as examples when I 
was still learning superkaramba theming myself.  So I run superkaramba as 
a separate app, and the rather large and complex superkaramba theme 
continues running even when I shut plasma-desktop down (killall or 
whatever).  That certainly means less complexity in my plasma config, as 
well.


Then of course there's the gentoo/sysadmin level factors.  I'm quite 
particular about keeping a package-cruft-free system, certainly WAY more 
so than most others, so probably at least a bit more so than you.  I 
always use update, deep, newuse on my emerge @worlds.  I don't trust the 
preserved-libs feature so have it off, and always do a revdep-rebuild 
after my updates.  Then I depclean, and revdep-rebuild again if libs were 
removed, just in case.  Of course, I religiously etc-update.

Also, I probably track changelogs close than most, especially for gentoo-
revision-only updates, since that indicates a gentoo change thought worth 
triggering a rebuild for existing installs of that upstream version, and 
for stuff like openrc, which I run the live-git -9999 version of, so I 
can and do track updates at the individual commit level, portage, where I 
check the changelog with each update and probably open and read the bugs 
for about a third of the changes, and udev, since it's so critical to a 
fully functional system, these days.


Whatever it is, plasma has given me very little trouble at all, since the 
rough patch in the 4.6 series when it had some regressions in panel 
placement behavior, etc, which I eventually figured out how to work 
around, but which the bug reports say is still a problem for some, in 4.8.

And really, other than plasma, kwin, konsole, and the other bits 
necessary to provide proper configuration and support for them (thus kde 
settings and the like), there's very little more of kde that I consider 
critical anymore, as I've switched off of kde for all my other critical 
apps, mail and the like, due to kde breaking them.  Sure, I've nearly the 
whole set of kde games installed, and a few kde packages like k3b, but I 
don't burn optical media so often these days, and games aren't so 
critical (tho it would sure be nice if konqueror and kmail "just worked" 
as well as kpat does... yeah, I know kpat's rather simpler, but just 
sayin'), so I've actually been quite happy with kde 4.7 and 4.8, even thru 
the 4.8 prereleases, ever since I switched to more stable gtk 
alternatives for the kdepim stuff and thus haven't had to worry about it, 
in the 4.7.0 era.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman

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