[Kolab-devel] State of Kontact Mail

[Del]

Hello Andreas,

I understand your frustration, and I do see that you were kind of
between a rock and a hard place (needing new KDE packages triggering
transition to Kmail2). However, Kmail2 had been in the making for a
year. There was a genuine risk of loosing developer interest if it was
delayed any further. Just go back to the half year on this mailing
list leading up to the release, and you will see the dilemma,
frustration and concern for users. One really cannot iron out all the
issues you experience until the software is accessible to testers,
releasing it was necessary to get there. No matter how long the wait,
there were bound to be users like you. Becasue of users like you, the
release was postponed a half year longer than I would have preferred.

It is the responsibility of distributions to shelter users from access
to early. OpenSuse even being a distribution for testers gave you a
clear hint by not making Kmail2 available by default in 11.4. The
mantra "release early, release often" is very important for open
development. None of us have Microsoft's billions of dollars to pay
for testing and bug-fixing. We need to join our forces, and that can
only happen if people like me get early access to software. SLES,
Debian stable or RHEL would never consider releasing Kmail2 in it's
current condition. They will wait for the rest of us to struggle
through the issues. I use RHEL at work, I use Kubuntu 11.10 with
bleeding repos at home. My choice home is a conscious choice. When I
get tired of testing I just roll back to something less bleeding.

My advice to you is to refrain from bleeding edge software unless you
plan on spending a non-trivial amount of hours submitting bug-reports
and doing bug-hunting. Trust your distribution to give you what you
need, and consider going for a stable distribution at work. OpenSuse
and Fedora has on numerous occasions proven to be a disastrous choice
for enterprise computing. You really only have three options if you
want stable KDE, and that is SLES, RHEL or Debian Stable. Even Ubuntu
LTS is a bit on the bleeding end for KDE.

Moreover, consider settling with exactly what your distribution of
choice ships. Wait with all the new and fancy stuff (even if it annoys
you) until it trickles down to your distributions mainline repos.
Consider virtualisation if you really need some bleeding edge stuff
which can break your system. For complex software stacks like Kontact,
this rule is particularly important. Kmail1 is still the best client
out there, significantly better than the newest Thunderbird in my
book.

Cheers,
Del


On Sat, Dec 3, 2011 at 8:20 PM, Andreas Gungl <a.gungl at gmx.de> wrote:
> Am Donnerstag, 1. Dezember 2011 schrieb Bernhard Reiter:
>> On Thursday 24 November 2011 17:48:55 Andreas Gungl wrote:
>> > Like many others I'm disappointed from KMail in KDE 4. All that Akonadi
>> > stuff might be technically interesting, but as long as things don't work
>> > as stable and fast as KMail in KDE 3, I wouldn't give it more credit
>> > than Thunderbird.
>>
>> If you want to check out Kontact Mail (the new design) you should do it
>> for  seeing the potential or for helping to improve it.
>> If you want a stable Kolab Client or just a nice Email and PIM
>> application,  use a stable Kontact E35 based on the KDE 3 Plattform.
>> It nicely integrated with the new Plasma Desktops based on KDE Plattform 4.
>> Kontact Enterprise35 has been continously maintained and improved,
>> it is mature with lots of enterprise production experience.
>
> Hm, OpenSUSE 11.4 didn't provide KDE3 packages, so somehow I suddenly was on
> KDE4 (although I knew about potential problems with the Akonadi stack). Okay,
> at home I still run the stock RPMs for 11.4 which still provide KMail 1.13.6.
> I'm really happy with that, and I'll tell you why.
>
> In the office I had problems with some KDE components so I decide to install
> newer packages for OpenSUSE 11.4. The actual problem was solved, but suddenly
> I was faced with KMail 2. No full text search without Nepomuk, but that one
> was slow as hell. The components used huge parts of RAM. Migration got stuck
> and was tried a few times automatically.
> When I had the system eventually working, I took ages for filtering, folder
> changes, syncing with some thousand messages. The situation improved with each
> newer version I installed, but I'm still far from what I was used to before.
>
> At the moment I use KDE 4.7.3 in the office. The KMail version is still not as
> good as KMail 1 at home, but it worked well enough. So I decided to enable
> Nepomuk. I need the search function from time to time, and I was fed up with
> missing that function.
> The system got very busy and unresponsive. I decided to let it run over night,
> because I cannot afford to do my daily work with a blocked system. Next morning
> I had a working system, except when I switched to some folders in the
> mixedmaildir resource. Then I got some messages in Akonadi about timeouts in
> dbus (was discussed on the kde-pim list). I needed to restart Kontact to be
> able to continue my work. Sometimes I start Thunderbird in parallel. Most part
> of my messages are on an IMAP account, so KMail / Akonadi can go crazy while I
> still can work with e-mail - at least as long, as the load of Akonadi doesn't
> bring my system to its limits. So I got to knew Thunderbird in detail. I
> definitely don't prefer it over KMail 1, but it just works. And so it
> outperforms KMail 2. :-(
>
> You certaily can understand my disappointment. I'm guilty, I'd better sticked
> to KMail 1 as I did at home. But I want to be fair. Akonadi and KMail 2 get
> better with each new version. Discussions on the kde-pim list show potential
> for certain optimizations which are very promising. Perhaps KDE 4.8 will solve
> most of the problem I had with KMail 2. After KDE 4.7.3 I'm more confident to
> get a happy end, even if it still may be far away.
>
> At home I'll definitely wait with any KDE update until I know about a KMail 2
> which won't give me headaches both during migration and afterwards. I don't
> need such problems once again.
>
> Best regards,
> Andreas
>
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