Following the post about what happened in KDE PIM in January and February let’s look into what the KDE PIM community has been up to in March and April. In total 38 contributors have made almost 1700 changes. Big thanks to everyone who helped us make Kontact better!

April 2020 Release

A new bundle of KDE applications has been released in April, including Kontact with its many bugfixes and improvements.

KDE PIM Sprint

Every year in April the PIM team meets in Toulouse in France for a weekend of discussions and hacking. This year due to the coronavirus it wasn’t possible for us to meet so instead we held a virtual KDE PIM Sprint. You can read the sprint agenda as well as Volker’s report from the sprint.

To highlight some of the topics discussed

• Moving KDAV into KDE Frameworks
• KParts usage in Kontact
• Remove the Kolab Resource, encourage users to use IMAP+DAV instead
• Data provider plugins for the KCalendarCore library
• Porting Account Wizard away from Kross (port to QML, eventually replace it completely by KAccounts)

KMail

Bugfixes

KMail has received its usual dose of bugfixes, mostly those:

• Fixed a crash when sending an email (Laurent Montel, bug 419473)
• Fixed a crash when adding too many recipients (Jonathan Marten, D28876)
• Fixed a bug when KMail showed only a part of an HTML email (Laurent Montel, bug 419949)
• Fixed a bug when KMail did not correctly display email answer in HTML mode (Laurent Montel, bug 418482)
• Fixed broken message status filter (Laurent Montel, bug 419720)
• Fixed the maildir backend creating junk folders around and not storing the path configuration properly (Igor Poboiko, D27722, D27906 and D28634)
• Fixed a crash when configuring the POP3 resource (Daniel Vrátil, bug 419726)
• Fixed name of the top-level folder created by the EWS resource (Igor Poboiko, bug 416663)
• Fixed the EWS resource not storing user password properly (Igor Poboiko, bug 414789)

Improvements

There were some exciting improvements to KMail as well: Sandro Knauß has implemented support for Protected Headers for Cryptographic E-Mails. This means that we also send a signed/encrypted copy of headers and display the signed/encrypted headers if available and ignores the unsecure headers. Currently we don’t obfuscate the subject to not break current workflows. Those things will be improved later on. Sandro together with Thomas Pfeiffer get a funding from nlnet to improve mail encryption. That means there will be more improvement happen the next months. The next topic they will look at is to add Autocrypt support for KMail.

Volker has improved the look and feel of the “HTML Content” and “External References” warnings in emails.

As the Libre Avatar service has come back from the dead a while ago, so did now the support for it in KMail. The ‘Export to PDF’ feature which we introduced in the previous report has been polished (Daniel Vrátil, D27793).

The ‘Move To Trash’ code has been optimized so that deleting large amounts of emails should now be faster.

For developers it is now possible to open Chromium DevTools inside the message viewer pane to make it easier to debug message templates.

KOrganizer

Bugfixes

• Fixed crashes in category and filter managers (Allen Winter)
• Fixed bug when single instance of a recurring event couldn’t be changed (Shashwat Jolly, bug 410758)
• Fixed crash when creating a new Todo from Kontact (David Faure, bug 420192)
• Fixed ‘Only resources can modify remote identifiers’ error when re-editing event (Igor Poboiko, bug 407965)
• Fixed the DAV resource getting stuck when parse error occurs (David Faure, D27858)

Improvements

The Google Calendar and Google Contacts backends have been merged into a single Google Groupware resource (Igor Poboiko, D28560). The change should be mostly transparent to users, the old backends will be migrated to the new unified backend automatically after update. During this Igor also fixed various bugs and issues in the backends and the LibKGAPI library, big kudos to him!

The DAV resource is now able to synchronize the calendar color from KOrganizer to the DAV server (David Faure, D28938). Related to that, the menu to configure calendar color in KOrganizer has been simplified by removing the “Disable Color” action.

It is now easier to recognize and set the default calendar and the event editor now respects the settings correctly.

KJots

KJots, the note taking application, which has been on life support for 5 years, has received some love recently thanks to Igor Poboiko. Most of the things were happening under the hood: some ancient dusty code has been dropped, some refactoring happening, etc. However, if you still use KJots, you might also notice quite a number of changes too. And if you don’t, it’s a good time to consider using it :)

Bugfixes

• Fixed a data loss issue due to bugs in the Akonadi Maildir resource, which is used as a KJots backend
• Fixed a crash on startup (bug 420228)
• Fixed multiple actions for the same shortcut (bug 384000)
• Fixed bookmarks support (D29073)
• Fixed export to plain text and to HTML
• Fixed random scrollback jumps (bug 195828)
• Fixed nested bullet lists breaking the undo stack (bug 256001)

Improvements

• Link destination is displayed in tooltip (D29289)
• Ctrl+click follows the link (bug 244846)
• Priting support has been revived (D29045)
• The text editing widget now supports different headings (bug 230317)
• Improved support for nested bullet lists

Future

Igor has quite huge plans for the future of KJots. First of all, more bug squashing. Secondly: ability to store notes in Markdown format, synchronization with online services (thoughts are on OwnCloud/NextCloud, or proprietary Evernote). On a lesser scale, the port to the same text editing component as used by KMail email composer is being considered, which will give KJots more text-editing features. There are also plans to add a support for inline checkboxes introduced in Qt 5.14, which would allow making checklists and TODO-lists in KJots, and ability to sort books and pages by their modification date (so more relevant would pop up first).

Other components

Other parts of PIM has also received bugfixes and improvements. Kleopatra, the certificate management software, now displays GPG configuration tabs and option groups always in the same order (Andrey Legayev, T6446). A bug in Akregator has been fixed that could have caused some feeds to have an icon missing (David Faure, D28581). KAlarm has received a bunch of UI improvements as well as some smaller features - for instance it is now possible to import alarms from multiple calendars at once and the calendar list is now sorted by name (all by David Jarvie).

Common Infrastructure

Lots of work went into modernizing Akonadi, the “backend” service for Kontact. One major change was switch to C++17 and some initial usage of C++17 features internally (public API is still C++11-compatible). Widgets for managing Tags have been improved and polished and the deprecated ItemModel and CollectionModel have been removed.

The KIMAP library has been optimized to better handle large message sets (Daniel Vrátil, D28944). The KLDAP library can now connect to LDAP server using SSL encryption (Tobias Junghans, D28915), alongside the existing TLS support.

Volker Krause has been working on preparing the KDAV library (which implements the DAV protocol) into KDE Frameworks.

Laurent Montel has been working throughout the entire PIM codebase, preparing it to port to Qt6, once it’s available.

Help us make Kontact even better!

Take a look at some of the junior jobs that we have! They are simple, mostly programming tasks that don’t require any deep knowledge or understanding of Kontact, so anyone can work on them. Feel free to pick any task from the list and reach out to us! We’ll be happy to guide you and answer all your questions. Read more here…

Following the post about what happened in KDE PIM in November and December by Volker, let’s look into what the KDE PIM community has been up to in the first two months of the new year. In total 23 contributors have made 740 changes.

KMail

• A warning is shown when message composer is opened by clicking on a URL that asks for a file to be attached

• DKIM validation support is enabled by default now

• The email can now be easily exported to PDF
• Improved support for rendering markdown in emails
• “Important email” icon is now used consistently in KMail
• Fixed “Move Message to Folder” dialog not accepting certain characters (#415850)
• Fixed large emails not being displayed (#387061)
• Fixed attachments being lost when message is saved as draft (#416369)

KOrganizer

• Fixed restoring last used calendar in incidence editor (#411191)
• Fixed fallback to the default calendar in incidence editor
• Fixed a crash in release builds (#417794)

Akregator

• Fixed filename extensions being translated (#416983)

KAlarm

• Fixed message captions
• Added warning when no default alarm calendar is set during archiving
• Fixed crashes
• Better handling when calendars are added or removed

Common Infrastructure

Laurent has been working on porting our code away from API that has been deprecated in Qt 5.15. Volker has been working on removing KDBusConnectionPool from all of KDE PIM.

For network communication we now use some safer defaults - for example we enabled HSTS by default and we don’t allow redirects to less-safe protocols (i.e. from https:// to http://).

KMail and some other components have begun integrating KUserFeedback to provide some basic telemetry information about usage.

Help us make Kontact even better!

Take a look at some of the junior jobs that we have! They are simple, mostly programming tasks that don’t require any deep knowledge or understanding of Kontact, so anyone can work on them. Feel free to pick any task from the list and reach out to us! We’ll be happy to guide you and answer all your questions. Read more here…

In just five days I’ll be on my way to Akademy! I’m so excited to meet with all my friends from KDE! After missing the conference weekends in Almería and Vienna, I’ll be able to get the full Akademy experience again - including delivering a talk!

Build Expressive APIs with Modern C++

I’ll be giving a talk about how to use some cool features from C++17 (even if you cannot use C++17!) in your code to make it easier for others (and yourself) to understand the intentions of the code, which helps improve productivity and reduce bugs and errors. The talk will be on Sunday at 14:35 in room U4-08.

KDE PIM BoF

The KDE PIM team will have a BoF session on Monday morning (10:30 - 12:30) in room U1-04. If you want to talk to us about anything KDE PIM related, feel free to stop by!

–

Other than that my main intention is to make use of the whole week to do some intensive hacking on Akonadi, in-person debugging and fixing bugs :)

See you all in Milan!

The KDE PIM community has been working hard in March and April to fix various bugs and bring new features and improvements to Kontact, Itinerary and other KDE PIM projects. Here is a summary of some of the changes that landed in the past two months.

KDE PIM Sprint

The team has met for a weekend for a traditional spring PIM sprint in Toulouse at the beginning of April. We focused on solving some long-standing issues in Akonadi, prepared some of the KDE PIM libraries to be moved to KDE Frameworks and discussed outreach and how to attract more people to KDE PIM.

You can read David’s report from the sprint.

KMail

KMail has received a nice batch of bugfixes for the KDE Applications 19.04 release as well as some small features, which will be available in the 19.08 release.

Improvements and New Features

The email composer has received improvements to support UTF-8 emojis (Laurent Montel, KDE Applications 19.08) and to support composing rich-text emails using Markdown with syntax highlighting (Laurent Montel, KDE Applications 19.08).

Additionally, notification when sending email fails is now less intrusive (Laurent Montel, KDE Applications 19.08).

Bugfixes

• Fixed crash on shutdown due to mishandling of QWebEngineProfile (Jonathan Marten, D19559)
• Fixed reconnecting to IMAP server when connection is lost during login (David Faure, D20028)
• Fixed identity not appearing after creation (Laurent Montel, bug 391631)
• Fixed deleting spam messages (Laurent Montel, bug 406324)
• Fixed custom header search query failing with inconclusive error (Laurent Montel, bug 405456)
• Fixed trying to send a message without any recipients fails quitely (Laurent Montel, bug 402577)
• Fixed a crash switching on an ad-blocked (Laurent Montel, bug 405434)
• Fixed a crash when opening a vCard attachment (Laurent Montel, bug 405791)

KOrganizer

During the PIM sprint, Volker Krause did a major work on cleaning up KCalCore, a library that implements the iCal standard to store events and tasks information, so that the library can be moved to KDE Frameworks. You can read more about Volker’s effort in his blog post.

New Features and Improvements

It is now possible to move event from one calendar to another in KOrganizer by changing the calendar in the incidence editor (David Faure, KDE Applications 19.08).

KAddressBook

Volker also worked on preparing the KContacts library, a vCard standard implementation, to be moved to KDE Frameworks alongside KCalCore. You can read about this on his blog as well.

Improvements

As part of his code cleanup, Volker has removed the DataMatrix from contact display, so we only display the QR code now (Volker Krause, KDE Applications 19.08), and did massive clean up of the contact display code. When displaying contact address on a map, KAddressBook now defaults to OpenStreetMaps (Volker Krause, KDE Applications 19.08).

Thanks to Laurent Montel it is now also possible to send SMS messages from KAddressBook through KDE Connect (KDE Applications 19.08).

Bugfixes

• Fixed dialing contact’s phone-number from KAddressBook through KDE Connect (Volker Krause, D20353)

Akregator

Bugfixes

• Make the feed URI the baseUrl for article previews (Pierre Ducroquet, D19739)
• Fixed Delete key not working after using search (Laurent Montel, bug 394946)

Common Infrastructure

Improvements

David Faure and I have spent large part of the PIM sprint investigating and digging into two major issues we currently have in Akonadi: database deadlocks and a bug known as “multiple merge candidates”. We were unable to determine the real cause for the “multiple merge candidates” bug, so it remains unfixed for now. As a result of digging through the code base, however, David has produced a set of patches to hugely improve handling of database deadlocks and transaction rollbacks in the Akonadi server. He also did improve the sync scheduling code. I have removed a large chunk of code by removing mostly unused code to handle Collection references and LDAP/Kolab contact merging.

New Features

• LibKGAPI: support for Team Drives API for Google Drive (David Barchiesi, T10521)
• KItinerary: support for parsing train booking from SNCF confirmation emails (Volker Krause, bug 404451)

Bugfixes

• Akonadi: fixed sync getting stuck after failure (David Faure, D19487, bug 399167)
• Akonadi: fixed race conditions in Attribute handling (David Faure, D19556, D19632)
• Akonadi: fixed crash when in resources when handling a collection change (Daniel Vrátil, bug 403642)
• Akonadi: fixed crash when an Akonadi client unexpectedly disconnects from the server (Filipe Azevedo, D19983)

Help us make Kontact even better!

Take a look at some of the junior jobs that we have! They are simple, mostly programming tasks that don’t require any deep knowledge or understanding of Kontact, so anyone can work on them. Feel free to pick any task from the list and reach out to us! We’ll be happy to guide you and answer all your questions. Read more here…

This blog post is long overdue, but now that I’m back home from the KDE PIM Sprint in Toulouse, which took place last weekend, there’s some more news to report.

Akonadi Improvements

On the sprint, I finally finished and merged a new improvement in Akonadi called Notification Payloads. I will not go into the technical details here, the most important thing is that this new improvement will notably reduce the CPU and disk load in Akonadi, especially during intensive operations like email sync. It should also help with the long-standing issue regarding errors and email duplication when using POP3 and local mail filters. Finally, this new feature opens doors to further improvements and optimizations like server-side change recording (technicalities here) and ultimately being able to shut down Akonadi Resources when they are not needed and start them on-demand, thus saving some more resources.

As I was touching the internal notification system in Akonadi I also improved the relevant debugging tools in Akonadi Console, our developer and debugging tool for Akonadi. Based on input from Sandro I also added Logs view. Thanks to that it’s now possible to see debug output from all running Akonadi applications straight in the Akonadi Console without the need to restart Akonadi or the application from the terminal to see the debug output. This will make it easier for users to provide us with relevant information to help us debug and solve their Akonadi issues.

Kontact Improvements

This was just a minor change, but it finally solved my long-standing issue with Kontact and Breeze: the side-pane icons to choose between different Kontact modules were colorful - the only non-monochromatic part of Kontact which was so obviously not fitting into the rest of the UI. With a tiny change, the icons are now also monochromatic, making the Kontact window look more uniform.

Native Gmail authentication for IMAP and SMTP

For a while now the IMAP resource supports logging into Gmail accounts using the so-called OAuth method, where you provide your credentials into the Gmail login window which also supports two-factor authentication. The IMAP Resources was forcing the OAuth method with Gmail for everyone, but this requirement has now been relaxed. Although the IMAP resource will choose this method by default it’s possible now to also choose the traditional authentication methods like with any other email provider.

Secondly, the OAuth support has finally landed also into our SMTP module which is used for sending emails, so if you select this method in your Outgoing account configuration with Gmail, you no longer need to use “App-specific passwords” from Gmail.

Syndication Cleanup

The Syndication library is used to retrieve and parse RSS and ATOM feeds and is used among others by Akregator. We have now cleaned up the library and removed some redundant dependencies so that we will eventually be able to move it into KDE Frameworks so that even more applications can benefit from it.

Going to Windows

Thanks to a huge effort from Hannah we are now able to build Akonadi and other parts of the KDE PIM stack on Windows. While we are still a long way away from having Kontact properly running on Windows, we managed to get Akonadi to work on Windows with some other programs. Windows is a huge platform and Kontact with all its features and functionality could be a good competition to established PIM solutions there and a huge potential to grow our user and developer base. While we still focus primarily on Linux, we are slowly looking forward to extending our reach to Windows.

Bugfixes

A lot of them. Big thanks to David Faure who spent a big part of the weekend debugging his IMAP resource to figure out why it keeps getting stuck on occasions. He fixed several issues in the IMAP resource so that it properly reconnects after server connection is lost or times out (due to poor internet connectivity usually) and also found and fixed some issues in Akonadi syncing code.

Future

What’s next then? We will continue to work towards a stable release for Windows, and hopefully soon finish the rewrite of the indexing and search infrastructure in KDE PIM to make it faster, reliable and more useful again. There’s also a lot of smaller tasks and improvements to look into during the year.

Let me start by annoying you with some pictures:

And now for the serious part: in my [last blog post]({% post_url 2017-09-14-randa-report-the-fall-of-kdatetime %}), I talked about achieving our main goal for this year’s Randa meetings - we successfully ported the entire Kontact away from the obsoleted KDateTime class. Since we finished this on Thursday, there was still enough time left to start working on something new and exciting.

Volker and Frederik went on to work on a KWin plugin to simulate various kinds of color blindness which will help developers to see how visually impaired users see their software, I did a bit more code clean-up after the porting and a bit of code-review.

On Friday morning Volker and I discussed search in KDE PIM. Broken and unreliable search was one of the most often mentioned issues in the KMail User Survey, which we ran for the past month and a half, so I decided to tackle the problem and make our indexing and searching infrastructure fast and reliable.

The final plan consists of several phases - starting with reorganizing our current code to put related pieces of code (like email indexing and querying code) into a single place to make the code easier to maintain. This phase is already progressing and I hope to finish it within the next week. The second phase will involve moving the code that is responsible for indexing data into the backend Resources - whenever a backend retrieves an email from an IMAP server or an event from Google Calendar it will also index it and will send the index data alongside the raw data to Akonadi. Akonadi will then take care for just writing the data into the Xapian database. This will speed up indexing, reduce the IO load and will ensure that all data are reliably indexed and stored before they are presented in Kontact. The third phase will involve changing Kontact to query the index database directly, instead of asking Akonadi to do it for us. This will speed up the search and provide results faster. The final phase will focus on which data we are actually indexing. As they say - less is sometimes more - so having fewer, but better-defined data will allow us to provide better and more exact search results to the user.

Once this is settled, we can make applications to depend on the search index - for example KOrganizer will be able to query the index to only get events from e.g. December 2017 instead of fetching all events from the calendar and then figuring out if they should be displayed or not, making calendars of even the busiest people to load instantaneously.

All in all, it was an extremely productive hackfest for the PIM team and I’d again like to thank Mario, Christian and the rest of the Randa team for organizing the hackfest. You guys rock!

And remember, you can still donate to the Randa fundraiser to make future productive sprints possible!

Randa Meetings is an annual meeting of KDE developers in a small village in Swiss Alps. The Randa Meetings is the most productive event I ever attended (since there’s nothing much else to do but hack from morning until night and eat Mario’s chocolate :-)) and it’s very focused - this year main topic is making KDE more accessible.

Several KDE PIM developers will be present as well - and while we will certainly want to hear other’s input regarding accessibility of Kontact, our main goal in Randa will be to port away from KDateTime (the KDE4 way of handling date and time in software) to QDateTime (the Qt way of handling date and time). This does not sound very interesting, but it’s a very important step for us, as afterward, we will finally be free of all legacy KDE4 code. It is no simple task, but we are confident we can finish the port during the hackfest. If everything goes smoothly, we might even have time for some more cool improvements and fixes in Kontact ;-)

I will also close the KMail User Survey right before the Randa meetings so that we can go over the results and analyze them. So, if you haven’t answered the KMail User Survey yet, please do so now and help spread the word! There are still 3 more weeks left to collect as many answers as possible. After Randa, I will be posting a series of blog posts regarding results of the survey.

And finally, please support the Randa Meetings by contributing to our fundraiser - the hackfest can only happen thanks to your support!

You can read reports from my previous adventures in Randa Meetings in 2014 and 2015 here:

• Hacking my Way through Randa (2014-08-15)
• KDE PIM in Randa(2015-08-13)

The first release of KDE PIM based on KDE Frameworks 5 and Qt 5, which will be part of the KDE Applications 15.08 release, is getting closer and closer. Except for porting the entire suite from Qt 4 to Qt 5 the team also managed to fix many bugs, add a few new features and do some pretty big performance and memory optimizations. And we already have some new improvements and optimizations stacked in the development branch which will be released in December!

The biggest performance improvement is thanks to switching to a faster implementation of the communication protocol used by applications to talk to the Akonadi server. We also extended the protocol and we can now use it to send change notifications from the Akonadi server to clients much more effectively than previously. Additionally we started cleaning up API of our libraries and improving it in a way that allows for safer and more effective use. None of this was possible in the KDE 4 version of KDE PIM, where we promised API and ABI compatibility with previous releases. For now we decided not to give any such promises for several more releases, so that we can tune the API and functionality even more.

During Akademy the KDE PIM team had a very long session where we analyzed where the project currently stands and we created a vision of where we want KDE PIM to be in the future. We know what parts we want to focus on more now and which parts are less relevant to us. KDE PIM is a huge and rather complicated project, unfortunately the development team is very small and so we have to make the hard and painful decision to lay off some of the features and functionality in exchange for improvement in reliability and user experience of the core parts of the product.

In order to make these decisions the team is going to meet again in couple weeks in Randa alongside many other KDE contributors and projects and will spend there a whole week. During the sprint we want to take a close look at all the parts and evaluate what to do with them as well as plan how to proceed towards Akonadi Next - the new version of Akonadi, which has some major changes in architecture and overall design (see the Christian’s talk from Akademy about Akonadi Next).

However organizing such sprint is not easy and so we would like to ask for your support by donating to the KDE Sprints Fundraiser. Although the attendees cover some of the costs themselves, there are still expenses like travel and accommodation that need to be covered. This year the Fundraiser has been extended so that the collected money will also be used to support additional KDE sprints throughout the year.

The KDE PIM Sprint is over (unfortunately…I could do this every day :-)), so now it’s time for some recap of what has been done. I’ll try to cover the Akonadi side, and leave the rest up to others to cover their projects ;-)

Akonadi Server optimizations

We finished and reviewed Volker’s old branch with a big optimization of the database schema. On my computer it reduces size of the file with the largest table by 30% and it speeds up all queries on that database, because the WHERE condition now has to perform only integer comparision, instead of string.

This however means, that we have to migrate user’s database on start. During the migration it is not  be possible to use any Akonadi-based applications.  We improved the code so that the migration takes about 10 minutes on my computer (used to take 20 and more). I personally think that it’s acceptable “downtime” for a one-time migration, so after I finish testing the migration code on other backends, I’ll merge the branch to master and we’ll ship it with KDE 4.13.

Server-side Search

When using online IMAP, only headers are in Akonadi, the body is downloaded on-demand when the message is opened in KMail. This means that Nepomuk can’t index these emails and thus can’t include them in search results. To fix this case, we want to make use of IMAP’s SEARCH functionality. We simply ask Nepomuk to search it’s database of indexed emails, at the same time we send IMAP server the same search query and then we just merge results and show them to users. Most of the infrastructure in Akonadi Server has been in place for a long time now, so I’ll just undust it, adopt it to our current needs and we should be good to go ;-)

Using Akonadi to store tags

I already mentioned this in the previous report: we want to cache tags in the Akonadi database and write them to storage backends if they support it (for instance as additional flags to emails on IMAP server, as CATEGORIES into events in iCal, etc.). Thanks to it it will be possible to share tags between multiple computers, yay! We just need to modify the Nepomuk libraries, so that when you ask Nepomuk for all data tagged with “Holiday”, Nepomuk can search it’s own database and also query Akonadi. Another benefit will be that filtering emails in KMail by tags will be much much faster, because the relation will be stored locally in Akonadi and we won’t have to talk to Nepomuk, which is very slow (mostly because of Virtuoso).

Storing conversations and threads in Akonadi

In his comment under my last blog, Till Adam said:

[…] KMail has the second best threading in the world, I think, second only to mutt because that is faster. […]

Why can’t KMail just have the very best threading in the world? Because right now it has to fetch the entire folder from Akonadi in order to be able to perform Subject comparision when building threads. That’s both very slow and CPU-intensive operation. So we thought: let’s store information about relations between emails in Akonadi, and when KMail asks for content of a folder, we give back only first few conversations just to fill the screen, and then fetch remaining conversations on demand when user scrolls down. This should make opening even massive folders superfast and should save a lot of memory, too.

Akonadi and KDE Frameworks

The most-awaited discussion of the entire sprint was about KDE PIM and KDE Frameworks. When should we start? What has to be done? What can we use this opportunity for? From Akonadi point of view I want to do several things: remove deprecated API, change some API so that we use consistent naming and separate UI and non-UI stuff. Volker Krause suggested that we could move the client libraries into Akonadi repository with Akonadi server, so thatwe could share some of the code (protocol parsers for example), which I like, so we’ll go for that, too.

A bit unrelated, but still: the Akonadi server already compiles with Qt 5 for a while, so possibly during this development cycle we might switch to supporting only Qt 5 (and making use of all the C++11 awesomeness). There’s a little library that kdepimlibs link against, so we just build both Qt 4 and Qt 5 versions of it. Akonadi depends only on QtCore and QtDBus, so we only need distros to ship qt5-qtbase, which we believe most of them do by now.

Gmail resource

I’ve been promising this for ages, now I finally discussed this with others, got some input and can start hacking :-) Let’s see if I can do something before Christmas ;-) Gmail resource would store all your mails in one folder and would create virtual folders for each label and just link emails from the “All mails” folder into respective labels. This way the emails will share flags (read/unread), and you will even be able to manage the labels by linking or unlinking emails from label folders in KMail.

Here I’d like to thank everyone for coming to Brno - if was a lot of fun and great pleasure to see all of you again, and also thank Red Hat for letting us use the office. Looking forward to see you all again on FOSDEM, next sprint, Akademy or anywhere else :-)

The KDE PIM sprint in Brno, Czech republic starts this Friday, but some KDE developers just could not wait and decided to come to Brno already on Monday to work with the Red Hat KDE Team. Some of the stuff we are hacking right now is PIM related, but we also want to use this few days to work on other projects that we are involved in, but that are not strictly related to KDE PIM.

So I’m just sitting right now in the office with Àlex Fiestas, David Edmundson, Vishesh Handa, Martin Klapetek and my colleagues Jan Grulich and Lukáš Tinkl. I’m waiting for Àlex to finish polishing his port of BlueDevil to BlueZ5, so that we can start hacking on KScreen - there are far too many bugs that need our attention and we’ve been neglecting KScreen quite a lot in the past few months. We want to fix the annoying crash in our KDED module, solve a regression that my bold attempt to fix an another crash in KDED caused and discuss the future direction of KScreen - me and Àlex have different opinions on where we should go next with KScreen so this is a great opportunity to find a common path :-)

Vishesh has been relentlessly working on improving the semantic technologies in KDE and from what I’ve seen, it’s something to really look forward to ;-)

Yesterday, me and Vishesh discussed the possibility of using Akonadi for handling tags of PIM data (emails, contacts, events, …) and I implemented the feature into Akonadi and the Akonadi client libraries - only as a proof of concept though, I have no intention of shipping it at this point - much more work and discussion is needed about this. I also made further progress with implementing the IDLE extension to the Akonadi protocol. It allows the Akonadi server to send notifications about changes to clients using the Akonadi protocol, instead of D-Bus (performance++)

David Edmundson and Martin Klapetek have been working on creating Plasma theme for SDDM (a new display manager that for example Fedora intends to ship instead of KDM), and today they’ve been improving KPeople, the meta-contact library used by KDE Telepathy and that they will also integrate with KDE PIM.

My colleagues Lukáš Tinkl and Jan Grulich are working on plasma-nm, the new Plasma applet for network management in KDE.

More people will arrive to Brno tomorrow and the rest of KDE PIM sprint attendees will arrive during Friday, when the real sprint begins. Stay tuned for more news (not just) from the PIM world ;-)