Fixing things Akonadi doesn't with some SQL-fu

[Daniel Vrátil]

On Thursday, 22 March 2018 11:21:42 CET René J.V. Bertin wrote:
> On Thursday March 22 2018 10:53:14 Daniel Vrátil wrote:
> >problem with our contributions not being accepted. If the maintainer has a
> >different vision than the customer you work for, a compromise can often be
> >found that suits both sides (as long as customer's vision is not removing
> >Akonadi for instance...).
> 
> You make it sound as if the Kontact/KMail front-end isn't considered as
> something that's valuable enough in its own right. 

Where did I say that?

What I meant by my comment is that as an upstream maintainer I would be very 
hesitant to accept a contribution that does not fit into the vision of the 
project and direction in which the project is heading just because someone was 
paid to do it. Especially since this contributor would be gone once the money 
run out and it would be up to us to maintain it.

> That's a pity. I could
> easily imagine for instance that the Akonadi backend doesn't have the
> solution most suitable for embedding/bundling, as a mobile app for
> instance. 

Historically Akonadi was running on Windows CE and it has means of running 
multiple Resources in a single process. Since modern mobile OS have more 
restrictions on multi-process, we would need to do a few little improvements 
to also run Akonadi Server within the same process, but bundling this in to a 
mobile app and having the whole thing run as a single-process application is 
certainly possible and would not require any changes in the existing 
architecture. The major issue is that we simply don't have any UI for mobile 
PIM and nobody really has time to work on it.

I started working on an experimental touch client for PIM (using QML and 
Kirigami), but currently it's on a backburner as Kirigami is not there yet and 
there are more pressing issues that need my attention than mobile app (as sad 
as it is).

> (I'm also pretty certain that the current architecture doesn't
> allow making an all-encompassing standalone Kontact.app Mac app bundle that
> will interact as it should with other similarly bundled KDE apps on Mac -
> but that's an independent issue.)

I don't know how Mac bundles exactly work at runtime, but I suppose that as 
long as other apps can access the same DBus session as the Kontact.app bundle 
uses and they can access some of its config files to read how to connect to 
Akonadi, then there would be no problem with integration/interaction. If you 
mean opening-an-attachment-from-Kontact.app-bundle-in-Kate.app-bundle kind of 
interaction, then it's hardly something you can blame Kontact or Akonadi 
architecture for.

Btw we already have an Akonadi-based application working on Windows where you 
basically need to ship everything as a "bundle" on its own. Creating a Mac 
bundle is certainly possible, just needs someone to do it and maintain it. 
None of the current devs have a Mac (or a desire to own one as far as I know).

-- 
Daniel Vrátil
www.dvratil.cz | dvratil at kde.org
IRC: dvratil on Freenode (#kde, #kontact, #akonadi, #fedora-kde)

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