KDE's Project Silk
KDE's Project Silk
Posted Sep 22, 2009 13:21 UTC (Tue) by anselm (subscriber, #2796)In reply to: KDE's Project Silk by kragil
Parent article: KDE's Project Silk
I don't think you will ever be forced to use it.
Who knows? I'm already forced to run a completely extraneous MySQL server for no discernible benefit. It's as if the KDE-PIM developers have never heard of SQLite.
Posted Sep 22, 2009 13:44 UTC (Tue)
by sebas (guest, #51660)
[Link] (8 responses)
During the beginning of Akonadi development, the idea was to actually use
It seems that sqlite has improved in those areas, and work on an sqlite
All that has nothing to do with forcing people to use certain webservices,
Posted Sep 22, 2009 20:56 UTC (Tue)
by anselm (subscriber, #2796)
[Link] (7 responses)
The problem is really when people like the KDE-PIM developers have
their own notion of what is good for everybody and then proceed to cram
whatever that is down everyone's throat. I'm a big fan of »Heuer's Law«:
»Any feature that cannot be turned off is a bug.«
I don't *need* an SQL server to store a few hundred addresses. My machine
is running an SQL server but I need that for other things (such as
software development), and I certainly don't want my desktop environment
to mess with it. Neither do I want the overhead of another MySQL-size
daemon just for a bunch of PIM data (my machine isn't *that* big). Akonadi
might be a great idea if it was optional, or if there was a backend that
catered to people who need only very basic functionality, cheaply. I'm
generally happy with KDE but this tendency towards a fixation on
infrastructure for infrastructure's sake makes me look for alternatives.
Posted Sep 22, 2009 22:15 UTC (Tue)
by sebas (guest, #51660)
[Link]
Even if you only store three emails in it, it still makes sense to make
As I said, an sqlite backend is under way. That would be the one catering
Posted Sep 23, 2009 5:33 UTC (Wed)
by dkite (guest, #4577)
[Link]
Really, all this episode shows is that for serious desktop work, developers
Derek
Posted Sep 23, 2009 10:38 UTC (Wed)
by segedunum (guest, #60948)
[Link] (4 responses)
Posted Sep 23, 2009 11:02 UTC (Wed)
by nye (subscriber, #51576)
[Link]
Posted Sep 23, 2009 11:21 UTC (Wed)
by anselm (subscriber, #2796)
[Link] (2 responses)
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?
Posted Sep 23, 2009 14:15 UTC (Wed)
by halla (subscriber, #14185)
[Link] (1 responses)
Do you really think the developers think that way? They aren't in it for
It's no doubt fun to rant like this, but you're simply wrong about the
Posted Sep 24, 2009 8:16 UTC (Thu)
by anselm (subscriber, #2796)
[Link]
Whatever. But I suppose that even those »paying customers« would like
their Ctrl-Ks to work correctly ...
KDE's Project Silk
MySQL, its storage is abstracted so you could plug in a different storage
engine, however. The requirement is as simple as "right now mysql is the
only backend".
sqlite, but it was very problematic. Sqlite could not, at that point
handle the number of concurrent queries such a high-performance cache
would need, it also wasn't thread-safe.
backend is well underway. There's also work going on on a postgresql
backend, by the way.
of course.
KDE's Project Silk
KDE's Project Silk
providing a common synchronization and access layer for PIM data.
them accessible for your applications other than the primary email client.
You also don't want to rewrite all the email protocols over and over, for
every new email application. That's what Akonadi takes out of your hand.
to those very simple use cases you're talking about. It has only become an
option very recently, due to technical issues with it (see other comment).
KDE's Project Silk
kde, gradually increasing as apps are ported to use it. In other words, the
ideas were implemented using tools that worked at the time. Proof of concept
type thing. As it becomes more useful, more integrated, the availability of
suitable backend libraries hopefully improves at the same time. But the
necessity of getting something out there for people to bang on forces bad
choices.
run into serious limits and sometimes walls that gives them the choice of
writing from scratch or using something inappropriate. In this instance due
to the lack of a lightweight full featured data/storage/retrieval engine.
KDE's Project Silk
KDE's Project Silk
KDE's Project Silk
KDE's Project Silk
gratuitous coolness, as much as it might please your ego to believe that.
Don't be ridiculous. There are people working really hard to solve real,
hard problems -- problems that didn't exist in the days when KMail was
first designed, which only surface with today's email load. It's actually
one of the things that is developed commercially, instead of by misled
volunteer enthusiasts -- there are actual customers paying for akonadi,
kontact and kolab.
developers motivations and priorities.
KDE's Project Silk