On Monday, 2011-07-11, Ian Wadham wrote: > Surely, PIM could be designed around a shared data source (a relational > database if you must) in such a way that the various applications can > exist independently of each other, in a loosely bound form.
This is exactly how the new PIM applications are designed. Previous incarnations had dependencies on each other for certain tasks, e.g. KAddressBook and KOrganizer depended on KMail for access to certain type of groupware data and I think KMail vice versa depended on KOrganizer for handling events/invitations attached to email. The new architecture allows each application to retain their functionality without depending on each other running or even being installed. It's good to see that other people also find this decoupling to be a worthwhile goal. > KMail could even survive without the > data source. Definitley. KMail might be overly assertive in that regard, normally PIM applications will indicate the unavailability of their data source by having a semi-transparent error overlay over their normal UI [1]. > I have used it without an address book for years and just > relied on its memory for recently used email addresses. And if the user > wants Strigi and friends to index his/her emails, cannot KMail simply tell > them where to find the emails by updating a shared file or database? Actually KMail is not involved in this at all (remember decoupling?), a helper program is telling Nepomuk about emails and changes to email folders. This helper is enabled by default since we assumed that quite some users of KMail might actually be using its search for email functionality and would like to continue to do so. We probably don't have any UI yet for people who never search for emails and would want to have this deactivated, but that can probably be easily added in one of the next releases. The immensely improved separation of concerns will allow a far greater tunability than any previous version could have ever achieved. It's just that the main focus up until now has been to provide as much of the established functionality as possible. Cheers, Kevin [1] you can check this for example with KAddressBook if you stop Akonadi while the application is already running. -- Kevin Krammer, KDE developer, xdg-utils developer KDE user support, developer mentoring
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