KDE's Project Silk

Posted Sep 23, 2009 11:02 UTC (Wed) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]

Posted Sep 23, 2009 11:21 UTC (Wed) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

Well, maybe it's just me, but if I have to have bloat then I want that bloat to actually *work*. This is something that Akonadi so far has failed to deliver for me -- it insists on launching its MySQL server and trying to import stuff from our LDAP server, but then it basically quits and says »I'm broken, I can't do anything«. Of course once it has noticed that it is, in fact, useless it would be much too much to expect it to clean up after itself (say, by killing the MySQL server again). Incidentally, the help link on the dialog in question leads to a 404 error. I don't mind debugging stuff but if people actually seem to go actively out of their way to make it difficult then I have better things to do with my time.

I'm cool with bloat that actually delivers something worthwhile on top of what is already there. What I am less enthusiastic about is developers who appear to spend all their time pushing the envelope and don't seem to care about the day-to-day stuff. They're busy working on a car that will fly (and it actually does, in the wind channel in the lab) but the fact that the steering wheel falls off the moment the car is being driven out of the driveway into the road is below their attention threshold. (After all, flying is much more important, and the rest is just trivial stuff that the users can fix if they are »bothered«.)

I'm looking forward to the day when Kontact will actually be able to maintain a stable connection to an IMAP server that is running on the same machine, with no gratuitous hangs. This has never worked quite right as far as I am concerned -- it's OK most of the time but once or twice a day Kmail just hangs until either the IMAP server is restarted or a timeout happens. (In point of fact the IMAP server is only necessary in the first place because Kmail doesn't handle Maildirs the way it ought to, according to the author of the offlineimap utility, which doesn't appear to be a problem with other MUAs.) *Maybe* Akonadi will help there but I'm not holding my breath. I'm also looking forward to the day that the message editor in Kmail will once more handle Ctrl-K the way it is supposed to, which is apparently broken in KDE 4.x. There is more stuff in the KDE 4.x Kmail that used to work in 3.5 but no longer does -- but hey, the developers are working on an INTEGRATED FRAMEWORK so who cares about little annoyances like these? If the users are »that bothered« with them they can go and fix them themselves, because the developers are too important to worry about them. If a user dares voice an opinion that something the exalted developers have decided may not, in fact, be the greatest idea on Earth then they're »whining«. Right?