[kdepim-users] kmailrc content, was: KDEPIM migration from KDE4 to KDE3.5?

[Martin Bernreuther]

Am Dienstag, 10. Januar 2012 schrieb Ingo Klöcker:
> > (BTW: It's strange that you find metadata like the number of emails
> > ("TotalMsgs") in a "rc" configuration file.)
> 
> It's not really that strange at all. Caching of those numbers allows 
> displaying the numbers without having to determine the actual numbers 
> (which might be incorrect the next second anyway). Determining the 
> actual numbers might be slow or even impossible (e.g. if the IMAP 
> account is currently unavailable). Okay, the numbers could be cached in 
> some other, non-configuration file (e.g. in a database as Akonadi does 
> ;-) ), but using the already existing configuration file was just 
> easier. Developers are generally lazy. Why else would they make 
> computers do the boring stuff for them. :-)

It's not the fact that KMail is caching data, I'm complaining.
Storing this caching data in kmailrc is IMHO bad design.
I'd prefer KMail to open kmailrc "read only" at the beginning
to get the configuration and "read/write" only if you change
the settings. I have kontact open all the time and in the
past I even didn't close the application shutting down
the computer. This was quite comfortable. Since I
had some problems with KMail freezing I also had
to kill the application.
Recently my kmailrc was damaged and I'm not sure,
if kmail was killed while writing these files. It's not
a big loss, if caching information is lost, but it's bad
to loose the whole configuration. Splitting the
configuration and caching data also has the
advantage that different locations might be used,
e.g. the configuration might come from a NAS
and the cachling data from a local disc.

If I restore a kmailrc file from a backup, will the
wrong caching data then just be thrown away?

Is it really that hard to open, read and write another file?
Does KMail not even use more files than kmailrc to
get all the data it needs?
I probably should run a kmail strace to check that,
but it's too late today. (Once I had a corrupted
emailidentities file and KMail did freeze,
if  I tried to write an email.)

But don't get me wrong. First I understand,
if someone wants to be "lazy". But I don't think
that this is the right  adjective for KMail and other
Open Souce developers, since they wouldn't even
start to do all that work then...

I'm just still not convinced about the
design decision here.

Good night,
	Martin
-- 
_________________________________________
Martin Bernreuther	MartinBern at web.de
_______________________________________________
KDE PIM users mailing list
Subscription management: https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kdepim-users