KDE 3.5.9 Brings New Enterprise PIM

The KDE community is happy to announce another update for the KDE 3 branch. KDE 3.5.9 is the latest bugfix and translation update for those who cannot or do not want to switch to KDE 4 yet. While currently no subsequent release for KDE 3 is planned, we will make sure to provide updates as they are needed to run your KDE3 smoothly also in the future.

The KDE-PIM enterprise branch that has enhanced functionality and stability in the PIM components KMail, KOrganizer, KAddressbook, KAlarm and of course its shell Kontact is merged back as official part into the KDE3 branch. Techbase has details about the changes in KDE-PIM. Among those are:

  • A Favourite email folders view in KMail, as well as drag and drop
    support for folders
  • Easier scheduling in KOrganizer through various improvements in the
    user interface
  • Improvements in KAlarm and KAddressbook

Enjoy KDE 3.5.9!

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Comments

by Vide (not verified)

Flock can change FB status via API, so I think it's definitely possible.

by Artem S. Tashkinov (not verified)

KDE 3.5.9 still rocks!

I will be using it at least before KDE 4.1.0 is out.

by Jos Anders (not verified)

Yes. I fully agree... 3.5.x is still way "better" than the lousy 4.0x. I dont think it will be 4.1 - rather 4.2 i expect og maybe Gnome if things dont improve.

by Troy Unrau (not verified)

Wow...

by thankfull (not verified)

"we will make sure to provide updates as they are needed to run your KDE3 smoothly also in the future."

You guys rock. thank you for your work.

by Joergen Ramskov (not verified)

I've tried before to switch from Mozilla Thunderbird to Kontact/Kmail, but Kmails imap implementation work, just haven't worked for me. It seems it is time to try again after upgrading to KDE 3.5.9 :)

by Chani (not verified)

people seem to recommend mailody for imap in kde. I've never tried it myself, though.

by Kevin Kofler (not verified)

If you were using a non-enterprise kdepim before, you'll definitely notice some IMAP improvements in 3.5.9. Compared to the enterprise branch snapshots, it's mainly bugfixes (also depending on how old your snapshot was).

by Joergen Ramskov (not verified)

Thanks, I haven't had the time to test it out yet, but I will get the time soon.

by love it (not verified)

KDE is proof god never abandoned us, he just joined the KDE dev team.

by JRT (not verified)

It also seems to be proof that the devil exists.

by YAC {Yet Anothe... (not verified)

I guess that I have a large disagreement about what the issue is here. I want to switch to KDE-4, but the KDE-4.0 BRANCH is still seriously broken and it appears that the bugs won't be fixed. We are back to the broken development model where bugs reported against the current 4.0.x release are considered fixed if they work in KDE-TRUNK, even if they specifically still exist in KDE-4.0 BRANCH.

by Kevin Kofler (not verified)

We've had this rant in another thread already... Bugfixes are definitely being backported to the branch, if a developer isn't doing that, nag him/her (assuming it's really a bug, not a feature addition, unless it falls under a freeze exemption like Plasma).

I think that you miss the point -- but then those that want to simply dismiss any criticism always miss the point. Dismissing a true statement because it has already been made in a different context is useless rhetoric.

If bugs are closed as soon as "it works in TRUNK" who is going to even know that they still need to be fixed in the realease BRANCH? For that matter, how will we even know that the bug will still be "fixed" when the next release branch is tagged/released (such problems tend to reoccur).

We shouldn't have to nag developers. They should take enough pride in their work to fix the bugs. Yes, some bug fixes are "backported" but that does not mean that all of them are. We naively presume that a release branch is more stable than the current TRUNK, but if the bugs are fixed in TRUNK and not in the release BRANCH, this isn't going to be true. If the release BRANCH isn't the place to, fix bugs, there is little use in having it.

See bugs 153986 (a crash, which was marked FIXED when it is, at best, WORKS FOR ME) and 152243, which don't appear to have been backported (AFAIK, they weren't actually fixed).

by Kevin Kofler (not verified)

I don't want to dismiss any criticism, only false criticism. I think there's some things which can be improved (for example IMHO the simple menu should be the default), but this process isn't it.

> If bugs are closed as soon as "it works in TRUNK" who is going to even know
> that they still need to be fixed in the realease BRANCH?

Normally developers are supposed to backport the fixes as soon as possible, that way they won't forget. Sometimes, however, other stuff comes up and they just don't have the time, and then forget about it, in which case politely (!) reminding the developer is the right thing to do.

And again, your proposed solution of fixing the bugs in the branch first is a very bad idea when you think long term because it means bugs already fixed in older releases can reappear in newer ones if the developer forgets to forward-port them. Both trunk-only and branch-only fixes are bad, but a branch-only fix is much worse in the longer term! Branch-only fix == regression. (And in fact, 3.5-branch-only fixes are one of the complaints I have about the way KDE 4 was developed: I had to forward-port 2 or 3 branch-only commits to Kompare, and that app got almost no commits recently, so I'm really worried about how frequent this problem is. So please don't say I'm here to dismiss all criticism.)

> See bugs 153986 (a crash, which was marked FIXED when it is, at best, WORKS
> FOR ME) and 152243, which don't appear to have been backported (AFAIK, they
> weren't actually fixed).

I've commented in those bugs. See:
http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=153986
http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=152243

by Troy Unrau (not verified)

With 6 months releases in trunk, this shouldn't actually be a huge problem. I could understand if it was 5 years between releases that this would suck.

Every KDE version ever released has had bugs. If we stopped to fix them all, we'd be in KDE 1.3.54 right now and would have never moved forward.

/rant

by Kevin Kofler (not verified)

But if all that's needed to fix the bug on the branch too is an svn merge and an svn commit, then I don't see a good reason not to do it. (And I'm a developer, so I know what I'm talking about.)

by Bernhard Reiter (not verified)

For completeness: 3.5.9 has a bunch of merges from the KDEPIM enterprise35 branch, which will be continued of course. The work for the new features was done by the Kolab-Konsortium members KDAB and Intevation. A big THANK YOU goes to our customers which basicially finance this development! They make it possible to have a number of professionals work on KDEPIM.