Harmless KDE feature upgrades - yeah right

[Kevin Kofler]

Juha Tuomala wrote:
> The funny part is that Akonadi is still very much a work in
> progress. I've tried to get it working many times without success.
> That's the reason majority still uses those plain resources.

Uh, Akonadi is now always used for contacts as of KDE 4.4.

> Few days back I asked Rex, 'Do you use Akonadi, or know anyone who
> does?' - He repiled that he doesn't. (please correct me if I'm
> wrong). I've asked quite many others too, which say that they don't
> use it. It's unmature. It would be interesting to know, how many
> KDE SIG members actually use it? :)

Uh, all of us who use kdepim apps now use it for contacts. We don't use it 
for anything else, but that's part of upstream's Akonadi migration plan. In 
4.5, all PIM data will be in Akonadi. Akonadi-based versions of all the PIM 
apps have already been merged into KDE's SVN trunk.

> I've talked to one who works for living with KDE PIM stuff, with
> Akonadi people and he says that they are very unsatisfied to its
> backends and it's still evolving a lot. They are actually moving
> from mysqld to http://virtuoso.openlinksw.com/ (already used in
> nepomuk, so KDE drags two RDMBS to desktop atm - funny.)

Virtuoso is actually not a traditional RDBMS. It's a semantic (RDF/SparQL) 
database built on top of a relational (SQL) core. As the relational part is 
there anyway, they also allow you to access it directly, so Virtuoso can 
also be used as an RDBMS, and this is what Akonadi is planning to do, so 
they can share the database server with Nepomuk, which uses Virtuoso for its 
RDF functionality. But even if the default changes, the MySQL backend is not 
going away, it will be needed at least to convert existing data from 4.4.

> I get that this is now being pushed down the throat at KDE side and
> they probably think that it might get better with wider testing base
> and thus they make the code depend hard on it. Fine, and they did it
> in their *feature release* since even they don't think that it's
> insane to enforce people in the middle of their workweek to become
> betatesters of some unfinished project.
> 
> If we only could get KDE SIG to start thinking like their upstream
> have intended them to think, lot of people wouldn't be in this mess
> right now.

Upstream has no policy about what kind of releases are to be provided as 
updates, this is a distribution decision.

        Kevin Kofler