[kdepim-users] rant

[Martin Steigerwald]

Am Mittwoch, 28. Januar 2015, 13:40:17 schrieb 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.

While I agree that the current implementation has its complications and 
that in case of an issue a user can easily feel overwhelmed with fixing it 
and while even with my current knowledge of Akonadi I still struggle with 
it at some times, I do not think that any "but the concept is all bad" is 
going to help.

I think the main idea behind it is sound.

But the current implementation lacks.

See Akonadi Next ideas, Werner posted the URL.

So or so, someone needs to write it. So again its: Either fix it yourself, 
or wait till someone does it, or organize a crowd funding to pay someone 
to fix it.

And yes, I know its frustrating. I have redone my private Akonadi setup 
from scratch after I lost MySQL database (see the warning I posted). This 
wasn´t exactly what I call fun. Well now it works quite fine with the 
SizeTreshold=32768 thing.

-- 
Martin 'Helios' Steigerwald - http://www.Lichtvoll.de
GPG: 03B0 0D6C 0040 0710 4AFA  B82F 991B EAAC A599 84C7
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