[kdepim-users] My impressions about the current state of KDE-PIM

[Alexander Puchmayr]

Hi folks,

I'm now a KDE-User since the 1.X times, and I liked it very much. I also used 
kmail now for several years, and I enjoyed using it because it was just the 
program I was looking for. An easy to use, mostly self-explaining email 
client, fitting into your desktop, having the same look&feel than the rest.

And then came kdepim-4.7. The first thing I saw when starting kontact (as I 
always did before) was: Dr. Konqi's Crash manager. "That'll be funny" I 
thought, and the "fun" is still ongoing. Since the crash dialog didn't show me 
which component caused the crash, I had to try it out one by one. Finally, 
kmail was found to cause the trouble, and after digging in the internet I 
found that some akonadi-resources were configured badly: the paths for local 
mail were empty, which caused kmail to crash (An empty path, possibly causing 
a NULL-pointer, which possibly causes a crash -- @devs: does nobody care about 
such trivial things?). After entering my paths, kmail started up.

The configuration was somewhat strange for me. It showed two local mail 
folders, one in ~/Mail (where I have all my mail), and a new one in 
.local/share/local-mail. Since I didn't see any reason to have more than one 
local mail folders on the same physical disk, I tried to remove the one in 
.local by using the kmail settings. This seems to have been a bad idea, since 
after a while it was automatically recreated and this is where the real "fun" 
started. 

The status now is, that I cannot open any existing mails, no matter in which 
folder they are. KMail only tells "Retrieving folder contents - please wait", 
and is doing so for hours until I gave up. 

So far my story, and I have to say that I never have regretted an update so 
much than this one from kdepim 4.4 to 4.7. IMHO kmail/akonadi is far from 
being ready to be released to the public by now. 

My personal opinion on the whole concept is, that on the one side, its a 
pretty nice idea having one instance concerning about the semantic desktop, 
and keeping all resources like mail dirs and accounts, notes, contacts, and so 
on in the background, avoiding several different apps to implement such things 
and therefore having one API for accessing them. I really like that idea, as 
it is a good attempt to make software interchangeable.

On the other hand,  ordinary users do not care about all this. They do not 
know anything about akonadi and its resources, do not care where all this stuff 
is stored on the hard drive and whether there is a database in the background 
or not. Bothering users with all that is simply asked too much of them, they 
lack the background knowledge. Even users that have advanced knowledge need 
several hours to get the information and understand how it works, time they 
simply do not want to spend. Such things *have* to work, and if they don't, 
they have to be considered to be broken. 

Finally, this is my impression of the current state: its too complicated, too 
error-prone and takes too much time to get it working. I really hope that this 
will be improved in the future, since it forces me now to migrate back to 
pim-4.4, and stay there until a really working and stable version is 
abailable, likely preventing me from installing further KDE-updates; Maybe it 
forces me to leave KDE entirely. Since I am definitely not the only one having 
problems, I strongly advise the developers to take that absolutely serious, 
otherwise they will develop for just themselves in the future.

	Alex
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