Has the KDE Social/Semantic Desktop been worth the hassle to anyone?

[Martin Bednar]

Le samedi 17 novembre 2012 16:30:05 Duncan a écrit :
> Kevin Krammer posted on Sat, 17 Nov 2012 14:29:22 +0100 as excerpted:
> > On Saturday, 2012-11-17, Jerome Yuzyk wrote:
> >> With all the hassles added by Akonadi and Nepomuk and Strigi for some
> >> higher "social/semantic desktop" purpose, does anyone actually _use_
> >> the stuff?
> > 
> > Of the above three mentioned technologies, only Nepomuk is part of
> > "semantic desktop".
> > 
> > The other two, while being used by Nepomuk as data sources, have their
> > own, orthogonal, use cases.
> 
> Yes.  You mention strigi's.  I'll mention akonadi.  Like strigi it has
> its use case.  In its case it's to unify the backend for the various
> kdepim apps, eventually saving time and maintenance effort by replacing
> multiple copies of contact information (for example) management code with
> a single copy.
> 
> While in theory that should eventually be great, it does mean putting all
> the kdepim eggs in one (much more complicated) basket, making things much
> worse if that basket develops a hole, since now it's the data from all
> those apps at risk.  Also, there's inevitable growing/change pains, and
> getting from here to there isn't an easy process.

Data is resource-dependent. A bug in akonadi doesn't necessarily put data at 
risk, a bug in a resource does. In fact, akonadi bugs losing data are very 
rare, most data loss bugs I've seen tracked down into one specific resource.

> 
> The database backend is both the trouble and savior in many ways, as
> databases are notorious for causing "ordinary users" (and not so ordinary
> ones as well) quite the headaches, not always being perfectly reliable
> without "professional" management, etc.  Sure, high-volume commercial
> stuff couldn't do without databases, but just to take mysql as an example
> since that was the first and probably most common akonadi backend, it's
> known for database version upgrades that need extra steps taken to manage
> the data format upgrades, and for such details as time and character-
> encoding (unicode/etc) format issues that database pros deal with and
> configure as a matter of course, but that simply aren't appropriate for
> end users to be dealing with.  Yet that's now what end users will HAVE to
> deal with, as kde and mysql upgrade with their distro version, and they
> find their old contact information not making the upgrade in one piece
> with them.

IMO that is a distro QA problem. Being a Gentoo user too, reading news is all 
I ever needed to do to keep my system clicking.

> 
> Plus, if there's a bug, binary formats are notoriously difficult to
> repair and are arguably less robust, compared to "plain text" and perhaps
> XML for contact info, etc.

You should never have to worry about the akonadi database : it's only a cache. 
This means that all the data is stored somewhere else (whether it be IMAP, 
POP, maildir, carddir), and that data is plaintext (or whatever). Akonadi 
resources only unify data sources.

> 
> Five years down the line, it might be stable.  Thunderbird and evolution
> both depend on database backends (sqlite I believe, now a choice for
> akonadi as well, tho it wasn't originally, and a lot of folks are still
> using the mysql backend) and they aren't considered /terribly/ unstable.
> But they've had years... the better part of a decade I guess... to
> mature.  What are long-time kmail/kdepim users supposed to do while it's
> stabilizing?  Basically, they're left either dealing with the problem as
> kdepim slowly stabilizes on akonadi, or switching to something more
> reliable in the mean time, from which many will never switch back.
> 

just my $0.02 : akonadi/SQlite user here, works like a charm. (maybe slower 
than with mysql, never benchmarked, also my email collection is "small" 
compared to what I've heard from other people)

> And that's what we see, some people choosing to live with the problems,
> some people switching to other alternatives, from which many will never
> return even after kdepim on akonadi is long since stable.
> 
> Was it worth it?  The developers obviously thought it was worth the
> risk.  Users like me are going elsewhere, likely never to return.  Others
> suffer thru it, and there's always new users after the stabilization.
> 
> But the answer those of us forced off have will be very different than
> that of the devs, and the new users who didn't have to live thru the
> upgrade.

IMO the akonadi change was worth it, I see possibilities everywhere with this 
framework. I see you mentioned "lightweight mail client"; did you hear about 
Trojita (IMAP only)?
Nepomuk is in serious lack of manpower; I know that I'll never be a big user 
(tags/ratings et al aren't for me), but just for the timeline and music 
ioslaves, it's worth it for me.

Regards,

Martin

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