Nightmare in PIM-land

[Timothy Murphy]

I'm trying to make sense of the setup in kdepim-4.8.2-1.fc16.i686.

I can say at once that this facility is in a terrible mess,
The documentation is either non-existent (KAddressBook),
out-of-date (<http://userbase.kde.org/KAddressBook>),
or utterly confused and confusing (The Kontact Handbook).

The best place to start seems to be f=>System Settings=>Personal 
Information.
Clicking on this lists a number of Akonadi "resources".

I have 4 entries here which seem to be relevant to my present purpose:
  Address Book
  Personal Contacts
  LDAP Address Book
  akonadi_googledata_resource_0

Let me call these my four Contact Lists.
On highlighting any of the first three, and clicking on Modify,
I get some information about the entry.
Address Book points to ~/.kde/share/apps/kabc/std.vcf
Personal Contacts points to ~/.local/share/contacts/
LDAP Address Book points to the OpenLDAP database on my server
akonadi_googledata_resource_0 points to my Google email address.

Now I've left System Settings, and gone to f=>Office=>Personal Information 
Manager.
(I can get to the same place in many ways.)
My 4 Contact Lists appear, together with a Search folder,
which I shall ignore for the moment.

I've highlighted Address Book, which is empty at the moment,
and added a New Contact, "Anne Murphy",
and a New Group, "Knapton Court Residents Association".
Checking, I see that the contact is indeed added to 
~/.kde/share/apps/kabc/std.vcf
The group appears in the file ~/.kde/share/apps/kabc/distlists

However, I can see no way to add the contact to the group.

According to <http://userbase.kde.org/KAddressBook>
-------------------------------
Groups will replace Distribution Lists.
Auto completion makes it quite easy to add entries to the group.
In KDE SC <= 4.4.2 you can't use the group quite like a distribution list,
typing the name and expecting it to be expanded into a list of names.
You can, though, copy and paste the list of names from the right-hand panel.
-------------------------------
I don't really understand what this means,
but I don't see any way of associating or adding a contact
to a group.


-- 
Timothy Murphy  
e-mail: gayleard /at/ eircom.net
tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366
s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College Dublin