Blogs

Like last year, the KDEPIM team convened in Toulouse to hold it’s traditional spring sprint. Unlike last year this time it was late spring, almost made it into summer. This time we’ve been hosted by Étincelle Coworking in one of their spaces. It was fairly nice. Lots of space, comfortable, well situated in the center. I definitely recommend.

The Warm-up

Some of the team (namely Carl and Volker) arrived early before the official start. I’m pretty sure Carl made it early to have lunch in the infamous Cake Place™ (at last). Of course a stupid amount of cake slices was involved. And after a short stroll we got to the meeting space we would use the rest of the time.

We started preparing the work board and finished collecting ideas as Dan arrived.

Day 1

Once again, we had two types of tasks: discussions and actual hacking. During that first day we mostly focused on the conversations but did some hacking on the side. Since the attendance was a bit low this year, we didn’t go for break out groups and did them all as a single group.

Said discussions covered mostly the following topics:

• Retiring some old software or now unused resources
• Trying to devise plans to remove some duplication of efforts (did you know we have several copies of the time tree parser?)
• Some minor stability issues were discussed to have a plan to solve them
• How to improve the usage of Akonadi on mobile which revolved mostly around some better partial syncing and some tight coupling with widgets at places
• Devising a strategy to have some end to end testing of the supported resources
• How to have better tag support and indexing in Akonadi (which opens the door to really cool features so stay tuned)
• And finally, we spent quite some time discussing how to improve our little PR efforts and how to recruit new contributors

Of course, like last year we’re contrained by the size of the team and so need to use smartly everyone’s time. Again no grand plans, but some of the items we plan to deliver during the year could have very nice consequences. We’ll focus on a better quality of life both for users and contributors.

Day 2

We already started some of the technical tasks the previous day, but Sunday was mostly devoted to them. We had a break for a nice brunch of course but still people worked on their branches around it.

As far as technical tasks, we got the following things done already:

• Some obscure and broken feature around notes in KMail has been removed
• KJots notes can now be imported into MarkNotes giving an upgrade path
• Akonadi tag discovery in caldav resources is a thing
• The Akonadi brand should finally not appear anywhere in the applications anymore
• A way to clean up the data coming from retired resources is now in place

But there’s more in the works, namely:

• the completion of the infrastructure for QtQuick based config dialogs
• the switch to KConfigDialogManager where is makes sense (instead of using an old PIM specific legacy system)
• the rewrite of the indexing system (which should improve performance and have instant indexing of payloads)
• the migration agent to apply tag discovery also to old and already existing items
• the move of KMime to KDE Frameworks is getting prepared
• the IMAP resource configuration system is in the works to be able to jump on the QtQuick infrastructure (it’s one of the more complex ones with lots of QtWidgets dependencies)
• the KDAV test suite is being completed for better coverage

The mentioned tasks and all the ones created during the conversations have been added to our Technical Roadmap on Gitlab. The work is still on going for some of them.

What now?

The most noticeable is probably one thing we acted on immediately after our discussions. We added milestones in the PIM group. Indeed, it’s probably not always easy for people wanting to join to know which are the bigger on going goals in the KDEPIM team and what to work on to help.

This is now encoded through those milestones. It’s the early days for them so they need to be improved and more tasks added, but at least this gives an idea of what has higher priority for now.

We plan to have a BoF at Akademy 2024 to be announced later when the schedule for the BoFs actually opens. There we’ll plan to focus at discussing the experience of contributors and see how it can be improved. We’ll also present our milestones. We might sign you up on tasks there, don’t hesitate to show up, we want to hear from you.

Last but not least

If you want to know more or engage with us, please join the KDEPIM matrix channel! Let’s chat further.

Also, I’d like to thank again Étincelle Coworking and KDE e.V. to make this event possible. This wouldn’t be possible without a venue and without at least partial support in the travel expenses.

Finally, if you like such meetings to happen in the future so that we can push forward your favorite software, please consider making a tax-deductible donation to the KDE e.V. foundation.