franKenMail? :)

[René J.V. Bertin]

Hi,

All this talk about interface issues and (d)evolution gave me a very wild thought: what about using my trusty old Kontact, KMail (etc) 4.13 or 4.14 frontends with the KF5 versions of Akonadi and the Akonadi agents?

AFAIK the frontends communicate through DBus with the agents so there should be no Qt mix-and-mis-matching in any individual process involved. I also understand that the KF5 versions use exactly the same runtime (DBus) namespaces which is why they cannot be installed and active together on a single system. That doesn't of course exclude the possibility that crucial protocols have been extended with required calls which Kontact4 and family don't make.

I'm not expecting anyone ever tried this, but some might have an idea if it could work (Dan? :))

The way I see it, this would

- allow (users like) me to contine to interact with an application that "just works" as we're used to it
- possibly benefit from improvements like more efficient/faster handling of IMAP email and updated support for GMail
- not lose access to KNode ;)

I'm approaching this from using a system that's still running KUbuntu 14.04 with a self-updated Plasma4 desktop and more and more KF5 stuff installed in a subprefix. I think many current mainstream distributions still have the KDE4 libs installed and it might actually be easier to pull off this kind of experiment with installing the KDE4 PIM frontends into a subprefix where they cannot clash with their KF5 siblings.

Dreamin' on ... :)

R.