franKenMail? :)

[Daniel Vrátil]

On Friday, August 25, 2017 11:54:54 AM CEST René J.V. Bertin wrote:
> 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.

DBus is only part of the interface. Majority of the communication goes trough 
custom protocol that has changed substantially between KDE 4 and KF5 versions 
(basically in KDE 4 it was an IMAP-like text protocol, in KF5 the protocol is 
purely binary).

It might be possible to write a translation layer from the binary protocol 
that modern Akonadi speaks to the old protocol that kdepimlibs4 understand. 
That would be a lot of coding effort though and I'm not sure if all the 
behavior can be mapped still.

> 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 don't want to disclose too much yet, but there might be NNTP support coming 
to KMail at some not-too-distant point in the future ;-)

> 
> 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.


-- 
Daniel Vrátil
www.dvratil.cz | me at dvratil.cz
facebook.com/danvratil | @danvratil | +DanVrátil

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