Once again, I got the honor of the Halloween special for the News from KDE PIM post. Let’s see what happened during the last two months.

Akademy 2022

Akademy 2022 happened in early October. Since it was in Barcelona it was almost next door for me and I could easily attend by train. Of course, a PIM BoF occurred there. Here are a few notes of what was discussed there:

• we might move to a less aggressive dependency bumping strategy, supporting one or two KDE Frameworks past versions would help people working from distro packages to contribute
• the idea of merging the kontact and kalendar chat channels is floating around
• plans are being made for a PIM sprint (involving Plasma Mobile PIM and Desktop PIM) aiming at holding it in Toulouse somewhen during Spring 2023
• Kalendar will hopefully be splitted into reusable modules for other apps consumption (like Raven)
• the docker container for PIM development might be decommissioned as it’s apparently unused
• there’s growing interest into switching Akonadi to SQLite again, would help with the robustness, clearly will be quite some work though
• branching for Qt 6 will occur around the same time as Plasma

KMail

• Several bugs got fixed including Saving all attachments being broken (which was a fairly old bug)
• Now SMTP passwords are also stored using QtKeychain which makes it independent from KWallet (bug 441214), unfortunately more work is required on QtKeychain end to completely get rid of KWallet
• The crypto support in the message composer has also been improved which has been covered in more details in another blog post with images and videos, some more improvements are on the way.
• It is also now possible to resend an email you opened via KMail (courtesy of Christian Schoenebeck), definitely useful to send emails generated by another program without access to SMTP
• Language support has also been improved
  • More translators are available (Google Translate, Libre Translate, Yandex, Bing, Lingva you name it)
  • We can directly use LibreOffice auto-correction list now
  • Lots of bug have been fixed in the grammar plugin support

KOrganizer

KOrganizer handling of recurring to-dos has been improved. Since version 22.08.3 the “Toggle To-do Completed” action properly acts on past or future occurrence as you would expect. Indeed, when toggling an instance if it gets marked as done then all previous occurrences are considered done as well, if it gets marked as not done then all future occurrences are considered not done as well.

KDE Itinerary

KDE Itinerary gained support for boat and ferry tickets, ICAO VDS health certificates and many improvements to the travel data extractor which also benefit the KMail itinerary plugin. More details can be found in this blog post.

Kalendar

• Views now have a new “basic” mode useful for low performance or battery powered devices. In this mode the views are not swipe based and more static but significantly faster and less resource intensive.

• A refactoring occurred in the data models used in the backend. This led to overall performance improvements especially when editing events and tasks.
• The sidebar is now responsive and will adapt to still be useful when the window gets narrower. It will collapse in a strip or expand depending on the available width.

• Lots of bug fixes ranging from UI glitches to major crashes. Make sure to update to the latest version!

Kleopatra

• For OpenPGP smart cards supporting ECC Kleopatra now allows generating keys for the curves supported by the cards. Moreover, the keys stored on an OpenPGP smart card can now be (re-)generated separately. (T4429)

• The notepad now has a dedicated Import button. Previously, the Sign/Encrypt button changed to Import when certificate data was detected in the notepad. This behavior made encrypting certificate data impossible and wasn’t good for usability and accessibility. (T6188)
• Secret key backup of S/MIME certificates was fixed. (T6189)
• The Certificate Dump window now opens in the foreground when clicking “More Details” in the Certificate Details window for an S/MIME certificate opened from the Group Edit dialog. (T6180)
• Canceling an encrypt operation triggered from the notepad doesn’t show an error message anymore. (T6196)
• If one enters a bad passphrase when importing an S/MIME certificate in PKCS#12 format, then a proper error message is shown. (T5713)
• Fixed potential invalidation of keys referenced by commands which could cause those commands to fail unexpectedly. (T6157)
• Unusable actions are now disabled when the details of a remote key (i.e. the result of a lookup) are displayed. (T6201)
• The Certify dialog no longer offers expired user IDs for certification. (T6155)
• The keyboard focus indicator for labels is only drawn if the label received focus by a keyboard command. (T6111)
• Errors during Web Key Directory (WKD) lookups (which happen in the background when doing a key lookup) are now ignored. (T6202)
• Nicolas Fella fixed raising the main window on Wayland. (https://invent.kde.org/pim/kleopatra/-/merge_requests/28)
• The Qt binding of GpgME (used by Kleopatra, KMail, and other KDE applications) can now be built for Qt 6.

Misc

Now dialog box size in PIM applications are correct on HiDpi displays.

Community Analytics, What Else?

Of course, I couldn’t conclude such a post without taking a look at the community data analytics during the period. Let’s see how it looks for the past two months.

A big shout out to all those who participated in KDE PIM work the past couple of months. Thanks a lot! It’s an important job you’re all doing. You know who you are. Still, here is the activity graph of the past two months, so now everyone know who you are (offer them drinks if you get the chance!):

In the past two months, we had 30 different developers on KDE PIM (that seems rather stable compared to my last post two years ago). And of course, since my data is coming solely from git, this unfortunately misses people who helped with bug reports, docs, design etc. Whatever your contribution you can be all proud!

Now, how does the code contributor network looks like?

The three most influential ones are Laurent, Heiko and Volker. You can also see three extra persons pretty central to the network: Carl Schwan, Claudio Cambra and Sandro Knauß. Clearly all the work on Kalendar and crypto support is showing up.

How You Can Help

Next time, your name could show up in visualizations like the ones above!

Check out the KDE PIM Development wiki and find out how to take part into something that matters. If you want your share of this or need help to get started, feel free to contact us via the #kontact and #akonadi IRC channels on Libera Chat or via #kontact:kde.org and #akonadi:kde.org on Matrix.

Also, consider making a tax-deductible donation to the KDE e.V. foundation