Kolab client integration

Bernhard Reiter bernhard at intevation.de
Tue Jul 13 13:37:22 CEST 2004


On Tuesday 13 July 2004 13:11, Cornelius Schumacher wrote:
> On Tuesday 13 July 2004 11:03, Bernhard Reiter wrote:
> > I guess I am allergic to strange "magic" criticism. ;-)
> > Cornelius and many others can configure it
> > and him saying: "Nobody can" is overplaying it.
>
> That's right. I was exaggerating to get my point through, that the
> configuration is overly complex. It would be much easier with the wizard. I
> think we agree on that.

In general I think that wizards are suboptimal
and usually a sign that othe parts of the design not good enough.
Wizards can even lower the usability with introducing
another way of doing the same think often with less understanding.
Probably this is not the right place for such a general debate.
With Kolab (and any groupware) users need some more understanding
of the issues, a simple "configuration" is not the usual case.

On the exaggerating: It is not helpful at all!
We go out of our way to let Free Software benefit as much as we
can and I am personally trying hard and listing to any advise.
My suggestions on the othe hand are not much listened to,
because I  am not perceived as contributor.
Then those exaggerations are a slap in the face.

> What personally annoys me is that I spent time on creating the wizard
> framework and implementing the KOrganizer side of the Kolab configuration
> in the wizard, but then you did not pick up that work and did not complete
> it although you promised to do this many times.
>
> > Michel's ongoing efforts are public at:
> > http://kolab.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs-kolab.cgi/doc/proko2-doc/
> > We do not have more internal documentation we could publish.
>
> The documentation belongs into the manuals of the client. 

Naturally, though it is better to have it there then to not have it.

>That's one
> important aspect of integration you have not addressed up to now.

To make Proko2 possible at all we need to delay documentation
until we have more important technical stuff done and properly integrated.
You are saying that there are several "important" ones that we didn't do,
and this is slightly overplaying again. 
I have seen many bad KDE documentations and blank spots
even in the KOrganizer manual. I would not call it "important".
Also I have not seen other "important" points, only the important
bug about the collision you have mentioned.

> I think the discussion shows that there still is a problem with the
> commercial Kolab development team and the KDE team working together. There
> obviously are different agendas and not enough efforts to bring these
> together.

This is politely put from your side and can be agreed on in general,
however I believe that both sides have to improve.

As for the agendas we tried to make our Proko2 agenda visible 
so people can talk about it. Kolab2 is a Free Software project which will 
come when its ready and depends on help from the participants.
I have also seen other commercial KDE developers actions and 
have the feeling that they make their agendas less visible in the way we do.
Different agendas are not a problem at all, as long as they are open.

We are aware that we are not perfect and we are willing to improve,
despite our good contributions to KDE and Free Software we already do.

Bernhard
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