[kdepim-users] rant

[Diederik de Haas]

On Wednesday 28 January 2015 11:12:49 René J.V. Bertin wrote:
> I'm not sure I agree with the akonadi principle though. It seems overly
> complicated and intricate. If the goal was to avoid a huge swiss-army
> does-all PIM tool, that has been missed blatantly IMHO. You just don't
> notice it (unless you fire up Kontact). The only advantage is that a crash
> in one of the helper components doesn't bring down the whole system (unless
> it does because of deadlocks and/or race conditions O:-)) The point is that
> even if you don't start Kontact, using even the standard systray clock
> widget will start up akonadi, and with it *all* services that you
> configured. They may not all be "online", but they're running nonetheless
> and I have the impression that connectivity issues can bring the system in
> an "undefined" state. And since all of this middleware stuff happens in the
> background, without really informing the user that it's there, things like
> "getting email to work again" can mean having to log off (or even reboot,
> for really unsavvy users), which is ann oyingly inelegant in my eyes.
> Applications relying on middleware, a set of agents sitting between it and
> the remote service(s) needs an easy way to reset/reinitialise that
> middleware from within the app itself, if possible with a status ("health")
> indicator. Having to open a terminal to type something improbable as
> "akonadictl restart" (or fire up a tool that promptly identifies itself as
> experimental) is just not acceptable for something so important as a PIM
> application suite that's the default for a desktop environment targetting a
> wide audience.

I fully agree with this.
IIRC the idea was that various apps/widgets/etc would like to use contact data 
and in that light having some kind of middleware would make sense.
But I very much doubt that assumption still holds.
I've tried to use a mail widget once but found it to be utterly useless since 
it would notify me of a new mail, but no way to interact with it whatsoever. I 
couldn't click on it to see the whole mail, I couldn't mark it as read, etc.
So to actually do anything with it, I had to fire up KMail/Kontact.

And given the (current?) importance of Akonadi, the way to interact with it is 
... let's call it less than optimal ;-)

Diederik

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