[Knode-devel] My feature plan for 4.0

[Volker Krause]

On Monday 26 July 2004 02:32, Roberto Selbach Teixeira wrote:
> So I thought I'd lay out some of the changes I think are in order for after
> 3.3. It'd be interesting to meet people in aKademy to talk about these
> things as well (maybe even implement some of them during the hackfest).

Talking about aKademy: On Tue 24th Aug there is the KDE PIM meeting 
(http://wiki.kde.org/tiki-index.php?page=KDE+PIM+%40+aKademy) which includes 
the following topics (among others):
- Planing the release after 3.3 
- Plans for KDE 4 (libkabc, kresources, etc.) 
- Library consolidation (libkdepim, libkdenetwork, libkcal, etc.) 
Since we are directly affected by these decisions, it might be good idea to 
attend this meeting.

> These are the things I'd like to do immediatly after 3.3 is released more
> or less in order:
>
>   * replace our ancient composer window for Komposer

AFAICS there haven't been any relevant commit to komposer since 5 or 6 month, 
so we should check wether the development of komposer will be continued - or 
continue it ourselves ;-)

>   * finishing the long overdue kmail look and feel changes
>   * change the article viewer to a khtmlpart -- also long overdue
>   * PGP/MIME support

Maybe we could even share the reader with kmail, i guess there won't be much 
differences.

> Aside from these changes, there are a few things that we should have as
> well. I may do those if nobody shows up with them first (they're lower
> priority for me):
>
>   * improve our attachment handling (including support for that
>     yysomething everybody and their mothers are asking on bugzilla)
>   * remount binaries splitted in several messages

According to bugzilla this stuff seems to be rather popular, although i never 
encountered them myself in a newsgroup. So this doesn't have a very high 
priority for me too.

I want to add the following ideas:
- Use KPIM::IdentityManager etc.. This would allow us to share the identities 
with kmail (korganizer does this already) and additionally it would fix all 
our identity related bugs ;-)

- I just yesterday found out that there is a NNTP ioslave in kdebase that also 
should support SSL. I didn't had a closer look on it yet but it might be 
worth investigating if we could use it.

- I've found hardcoded charset lists somewhere in the code although kdelibs 
provides the necessary lists. There are some related bug reports about 
missing charsets and inconsistent lists between reader and composer, etc. 
This might be fixed as well by using a new reader / composer.

- There is KFolderTree in libkde{network,pim}, which might be worth using for 
the account/group view (also used by kmail). This might fix some strange 
drag&drop bugs, allow to enable/disable the total and unread column and 
provide consistent icons with kmail.

- My favourite missing feature: On-demand opening of the KWallet ;-) This 
requires some changes in the account handling and basically a 
complete change of the current wallet handling.

I surely missed some things and while working on these items we surely found a 
lot of other stuff that needs to be done ;-)

There're also a few non-coding related issues:
- The totally outdated web page. Since it needs to be more or less completely 
rewritten it might make sense to move it from sf.net to kde.org while we are 
at it (pim.kde.org might be a good place). Don't know about you, but I prefer 
coding over doing web stuff, which brings us to the next point:

- We could use some additional help ;-) The quality team program seems to have 
recruited at least one or two additional developers for kmail/korganizer, 
promoting knode in this area surely can't harm.
Maybe we should add some hints to knode eg. on 
http://wiki.kde.org/tiki-index.php?page=Developers+Wanted

> Volker, I'm not sure what your plans are, but if we manage to do these
> things, we might even finally reach 1.0 somewhen in the not so distant
> future :-)

It definitively will be a lot of work and there will be not much left of the 
current knode code when we are finished ;-)

regards
Volker