ok, maybe i won't find any devs to back akonadi out of kde-pim after all

[Martin Steigerwald]

Hello Pablo, hello Paul, hello,

I skip the whole apology / denial part. I did not ask for an apology, cause I 
did not think that one was needed. There is nothing to forgive here. We are 
all human beings, and I fully get the frustration you had or have, Paul, with 
KMail on Akonadi. I felt this myself often enough. Just look in the mailing 
list archives or some of the bug reports for some outrageous rants of mine.

Pablo Sanchez - 21.03.18, 16:52:
[…]
> > if there are only a small number of people who understand the code
> > well enough to fix things, and those people have jobs and families
> > and lives, and so are not able (over a period of some years) to
> > invest their volunteer efforts, that's understandable, and we still
> > owe those people a giant debt of gratitude for whatever they've been
> > willing to do.
> 
> This is going to sound really stupid of me.  However, I'm old enough
> to no longer care how dumb I sound.  :p
> 
> I used to think there was a platoon of people who were working Open
> Source X.  For example, kmail2.
> 
> In fact, it seems there aren't.  There's Dan and Sandro.  (Martin can
> tell me how wrong I am!)

Well it depends on whether working on KDEPIM and/or Akonadi.

For digging deeply into the lower layer Akonadi I think you are mostly right 
when considering just the recent time, however I have seen Volker, who is with 
Akonadi + KDEPIM for a long time, work on Akonadi as well, on the new module 
PkPass for handling mobile boarding passes.

When considering the upper layer KDEPIM with all its apps like KMail Laurent 
invests a ton of time and work to improve things. Also Andre worked on 
KLeopatra quite a bit recently.

Of course there are more contributors who contribute more occasionally, so my 
list is incomplete.

I did not create any statistics and it really does not matter all that much, 
but I would be surprised if there more than 5-10 people contribute source code 
changes on a somewhat regular base. But whatever the exact numbers are: We all 
know there is an issue with only a few developers dedicating time to KDEPIM + 
Akonadi regularly, especially for the lower layer that is so important to 
improve the overall experience of the upper layer. Just compare the review 
request frequency and commit frequency of KDEPIM + Akonadi related stuff with 
the one of Plasma or KDE Frameworks in general.

I hope that in the longer run, the new architecture documentation by Dan + 
some kind of an action plan may be able help to attract new developers or 
current developers, who work on the upper layer mostly, who dare to dig into 
the lower layers. Akonadi has a quite complex architecture which can be 
intimidating to (not just) new developers. I made a quite nice performance-
related change in the Maildir resource quite some time ago, but with a lot of 
hand holding by some developers back then. I did not have all that much of a 
clue how it all works together. After reading through Dan´s writing I finally 
started to understand how the whole thing works. Before that I had an rough 
idea about it, but did not really get the big picture.

Thanks,
-- 
Martin