why is there so much "weird shit" in akonadi/kdepim?

[Paul Vixie]

On Sunday, 15 December 2019 20:52:44 UTC John White wrote:
> ... I live in kmail. 
> Over the years I have tried several email clients and kmail, with all its
> faults, is still the best. At least for pop3.

+1.

> If pgsql will solve some of the existing problems, and I know exactly what
> to do in order to make the switch, and if I won't lose ability to search my
> old kmail files, I want to try it.

you won't regret it.

> But I don't understand why, if pgsql is
> better, the developers don't use it.  I don't understand why, if akonadi is
> "junk", why the kmail developers still use it.

pgsql doesn't auto-upgrade as smoothly as mysql. going from pg10 to pg11 
requires a dump/restore cycle, or deletion of the akonadi tables and 
recreating them (by fetching all your stored e-mail and re-extracting its 
metadata.) so, it's work. if you stick to the first major version of pgsql you 
ever start with, and just do minor patch-level updates to it, there's no 
problem. but getting this right for non-expert users is really quite hard.

> It there anyway to get some
> kind of consensus as to which is better and whether switching causes other
> problems?  Is there some way to get some input from the developers
> concerning this matter?

the dev team for kdepim is small, expert, passionate, and focused on the 
things that are really deeply broken or missing, which have no workarounds. i 
expect that if they ran a "gofundme" so that they could dedicate time, as a 
team, to this project, then changing the default database engine would make 
threshold. but right now they are volunteering, and we are lucky to have them.

-- 
Paul