KDE PIM/Meetings/Osnabrueck 11

The annual KDE PIM Meeting took place from 1.3.2013 to 3.3.2013 at the KDAB offices in Berlin.

Participants (from left to right): Vishesh Handa, Christian Mollekopf, Tobias König, Cornelius Schumacher, David Faure, Stephen Kelly, Till Adam, Paul Adams, Sergio Luis Martins, Kevin Ottens, Jeroen van Meeuwen, Guy Maurel, Georg Greve, Kevin Krammer, Frank Osterfeld, John Layt, Dan Vrátil, Àlex Fiestas, Mark Gaiser, Volker Krause, Martin Klapetek, Ingo Klöcker, Alessandro Cosentino, Sandro Knauß, Andras Mantia (not on picture: Bjoern Balazs, Torsten Grote, Jos Poortvliet).

Topics

Projects

Projects we'll work on in small groups, mostly coding or creating other concrete results.

• Add your project here
• KDE Dependencies Repository: create and fill a repository containing all essential dependencies for kdelibs, kde-runtime, kdepimlibs, kdepim-runtime and kdepim, primarily for use on Mac and Windows. Define update policy for those packages.
• KDE-wide metacontacts (KPeople) - general overview of the state, architecture and possible uses
• Review John's proposed QTimeZone scheduled for inclusion in Qt 5.1 to ensure meets KDEPIM requirements, bug fixes, code improvements, etc
• WebAccounts integration for an unified way of managing web (google, facebook, ownCloud) accounts.
• Google Integration - creating dedicated IMAP resource with native support for GMail IMAP extensions and adding support for Google Reader to the family of Akonadi resources for Google services

Discussions

Discussions about topics, which are relevant to all or a sub group of people. Please state audience and desired result of the discussion.

Future Development

Audience: all, Desired Results: Plan regarding future 4.x releases and port to KF5

• How to move to KF5?
• KHolidays2 - Use JSON files? Try make standalone project for all PIM apps and desktops to use?

Marketing

Audience: all, Desired Results: Input on timeline, facts on good things on Akonadi, agreement on communication, group hug

Follow up on what we did at Osnabrück 10.

Add your discussion topic here

QML Calendar API

There is some awesome calendar stuff living in branches right now. That however is the C++ side. We don't seem to have any "developer friendly" QML layer to use all it's abilities. I'd like to draft up a "QML API" to make the calendar data easily available in QML. This is for the "calendaring" branch: http://quickgit.kde.org/?p=kdepim.git&a=shortlog&h=6854a4bb1b3843234ecc2ee9eb319585f56b84c9 Should we use a dataengine or a dedicated QML component?

We do already have the calendar engine: http://quickgit.kde.org/?p=kde-workspace.git&a=tree&h=0c2732e5a4bcd5f508ed52b3c7967e452cc04931&hb=b01fae8966132826097a97237bbf6954ebad6732&f=plasma%2Fgeneric%2Fdataengines%2Fcalendar. Should that be extended or should we go for a dedicated QML component as API like so:

Calendar {
  id: todaysItemsFromX

  // If no date is provided, all entries will be returned
  day: QDateTime something..

  // Fetchtype determines which events to return. Enum with TodoEntries, EventEntries, YournalEntries, .... etc.
  fetchType: Calendaring.EventEntries

  // The calendar from which to fetch the entries. If none provided then it will fetch the requested entries from all available calendars.
  calendar: "x"

  // The model containing the data with the filters applied.
  model
}

Above is just a "braindump". I'd like to discuss this idea with some people at the sprint and implement it.

Plasma Calendar

Added by John Layt.

We need to push for the completion of the Plasma integration, this years GSOC could be a good opportunity with its theme of polishing existing things. See http://www.layt.net/john/blog/odysseus/fame_akademy for my blog on what needs doing and http://community.kde.org/Plasma/Clock for more details. In short:

• Ability to choose Collections to display in a widget
• Ability to add simple Events and Todo's
• KAlarm integration
• Various UI improvements

It may be worth considering if we want to continue with the current Plasma widget or come up with something new.

One problem that also needs addressing is the Plasma Calendar launching Akonadi only to discover that no calendars are configured. To quote my blog:

"One other area that needs solving is what to do when a user doesn't actually use KDEPIM or Akonadi for their PIM needs but Akonadi has still been installed by the distro by default? At the moment we launch Akonadi by default inside the Plasma Calendar as soon as the user clicks on the Clock, and query it for any available events. Naturally it finds none, but by then it is too late, Akonadi has been launched and is seen to be using resources. "Oh noes, big bad bloated KDE!" Many distro's avoid this by changing the default setting to not showing Events, but then users may not realise that they can be enabled. A far better solution would be if there was a passive way to query if any Akonadi Calendar Resources have been configured and only launch Akonadi if they have. We could also then offer a wizard to configure Akonadi Resources if none have been. This of course is something that would have to be implemented by the KDEPIM/Akonadi team."

Presentations

Presentations of things interesting to the KDE PIM community. Please state targeted audience.

• Add your presentation here

Agenda

Friday

16:00 Start meeting, fill agenda, get organized

Saturday

10:00 Review first batch of work, get organized

10:30-12:00 Presentations, discussions targeted at whole group

13:30 Group photo

17:00 Review second batch of work, get organized

17:30-18:30 Presentations, discussions targeted at whole group

Sunday

10:00 Review third batch of work, get organized

10:30-11:30 Presentations, discussions targeted at whole group

14:00 Close meeting, collect next steps

Meeting Notes

Porting to KDE Frameworks 5

• Report from Kevin & David on status
• Progress made on prep work, Qt upstream
• kdeui main blocker
• also date/time
• once done will split
• Tech Preview end of this year
• Then QA process
• Will need early porters to test results before final release
• KDE PIM to be guinea pig?
• already kdepimlibs-frameworks branch
• initial port to build on kf5
• then make kpl "disappear"
• Can use CMake features earlier, e.g. automoc in 4.11
• Same of K??? can be done in 4.11
• kdepim no branch before tech preview, too much changing
• kpl branch has value as unit tests etc exercises code
• cmd line args stuff needed in Qt, have branch in Gerrit, hard sell into Qt, volunteer(s) needed for 5.2!
• lots of widgets stuff needs to move to Qt, need volunteers for 5.2!
• libpimutils?
• next meeting will be position to address kpl and kp porting
• can remove any q3support NOW!
• Could look to move K -> Q classes where not using the K extra features, but tricky to know

Akonadi/Nepomuk integration

• vHanda: Looking into using the nepomuk feeders for KPeople. Currently too slow (2 or 3 emails per second, goal = 10 emails per second). Already better than the previous situation, 10 s per mail.
• Completion in kmail composer (via nepomuk) is enabled again... but the goal is to replace that with KPeople (which has the contacts in memory).
• vHanda: Planned: adding support for persistent queries.
• C.M.: Letting the user control the feeder process -- people report CPU usage bugs, but if they could see that it's indexing emails, then we can differ that from actual bugs.
• vHanda: Missing features for complex searches: query emails by date range etc. (feature set == see search dialog in kmail)

Virtuoso

vHanda: "I think I can write a virtuoso replacement in a month or two" (!) == mainly a SPARQL to SQL converter (limited to the SPARQL subset used in KDE)

Problems with virtuoso:

• Their use case is web-based stuff, so no consistency checking (it's not strongly typed at all, all values go into the same column).
• Some fields cannot be indexed (e.g. no date/time searches) - FALSE - DateTime Queries seem to have a separate index. Need to investigate more.
• Memory consumption (Milian, help!). Caches in virtuoso + caches in nepomuk.
• No support for cancelling queries (although, with Sebastian now working on virtuoso, we could push for that)
• Two databases, we could use akonadi's DB instead.
• No support for stemming in text-based searches.
• Lots of data copying (e.g. for one email, there's the email on disk, in akonadi DB, in virtuoso's SQL table, in virtuoso's full text index).
• This extra data copying cannot be streamed. So the text content of the large pdf files is loaded into memory and pushed all in one go into virtuoso cause there are no streaming operators. With our own solution, we would not store this extra data and we could just directly pass it into the full text indexer.

Instead of one big table, one table per property -> more control over indexing.

 Need to choose a full-text-indexing solution, one idea is XAPIAN.

GSOC Ideas

• Kontact Touch
• Plasma Calendar / Workspace Integration
• Kontact Summary as Plasmoids
• Update KMail UI (improve delegates)
• LinkedIn Resource
• KPeople Integration in KMail (searching)
• Port Plasma Notes to Akonadi
• News resource for Akonadi and KMail
• Mail and reminder notifications Plasmoids (maybe as part of workspace integration)
• Document integration
• Application scripting, contact actions
• Marble integration with KAddressBook (there is an old experiemental branch)
• Social feed interaction
• KHolidays with JSON data files
• OS X platform integration

Calendar API for QML

We've had a discussion to determine the needs for a Calendar API exposed in QML. In that discussion we made a list of requirements:

• Make calendar data accessible through pure QML.
• Make it possible to access all data or just parts of it.
  • Fetch Event items
  • Fetch Todo items
  • Fetch Journal items
  • a mixture of the above
• Per item, be able to edit it
• Add new items
• make those items available under the QML import name: "org.kde.pim.calendar"

All of the above needs to be possible in plain QML for an application developer. For the first part (the non editing and adding part) we drafted up this Calendar API for QML which Tobias implemented. A working proof of concept is available for those that want to see it. More work will obviously have to be done in this area.

The part for editing and adding items will be done through controller classes. No work has been done in that area, yet.

Other notes will go here

Encrypting & Signing mails in kmail with umlaut/unicode characters

The problem with encrypted/signed mails in kmail is, that signed/encrypted messages have a none matching contentTransferEncoding. So the contentTransferEnconding of the mail is determied for the actual text to encrypt/signed. For non ascii messages this is quoted-prinable or base64. The encryped/signed content doesn't necessarily should have the same contentTransferEncoding. But neverless the contentTransferEncoding and the content must match. We fiddled around in the code and created #109272 on reviewboad, that fixes this issue and two bugs #289722 and #289728.

Blogs

When you blog about the meeting (and you should ;-), please add a link here

• Mark Gaiser: KDEPIM sprint – KDirModel + friends and QML Calendar
• http://community.kde.org/KDE_PIM/Development/Start#The_little_longer_guide (ok no blog, but a wiki entry based on http://blogs.fsfe.org/torsten.grote/2012/10/03/compiling-kde-kontact-from-source/ )

Organization

See the Osnabrück 11 organization page for organizational details.