KDE PIM Hackfest Summary

On the first weekend of 2003, Intevation, along with the other companies participating in the Kroupware project, Klarälvdalens Datakonsult and Erfrakon organized and sponsored a KDE PIM Hackfest in Osnabrück, Germany. The main purpose was to define a roadmap on the future of personal information management in KDE. Berndhard Reiter from Intevation wrote down a nice summary (included below) for your convenience. Thanks goes to the companies involved for making this meeting possible, and the developers involved for their participation.

This is a short summary report about the Kroupware/Kaplan Hackfest that took place on the first weekend in 2003 in Osnabrück, Germany.

The overall goal of the meeting was reached with significant progress being made towards bringing better integration between the KDE Kolab client functionality and the upcoming architecture of KDE-PIM (mainly associated with the Kaplan approach). All participants developed a common vision about how to proceed and no major conceptual differences remained. Some technical issues were resolved right away and consensus was also reached on what needs to be done in the next steps.

People started to drop in on Friday and left on Sunday afternoon. A kickoff meeting started the hackfest on Friday afternoon. To get everyone on common ground, presentations were given. After a general overview of the Kroupware project, more technical introductions to the currently implemented KDE Kolab client and the Kaplan approach followed:

At the core of the Kolab architecture stands the standards-based IMAP protocol. Basically, this protocol is used to save all sorts of information on the server and allowing offline changes which are later synced. This capability is not specific or restricted to any particular groupware. The current KDE client implementation based on the upcoming KDE 3.1 makes KMail, KOrganizer and KAddressbook save their information using disconnected IMAP controlled by KMail.

Kaplan basically tries to provide access to the capability of the KDE components relating to personal information management. In this sense, it needs all KParts done cleanly in a way that the single applications can still work standalone without being embedded in Kaplan. Kaplan therefore does not add much logic itself or solve the problem of interaction. It only forces a clean design and usage of common configuration and interaction methods.

After the problem space was explored, work was done alternately between working groups and meetings for coordination and discussions of new findings. As natural for an event like this, many successful informal conversations also took place. In the following you can read a few lines on what was archived by the different people on this first January weekend.

David Faure and Daniel Molkentin analysed DCOP and found that a better general DCOP service starter is needed which was subsequently implemented. DCOP error handling got examined and a some documentation on how to properly write clean DCOP functions was produced. KAddressbook was ported as an example. It is clear that more general DCOP interfaces need to be defined so that KMail and KOrganizer can act as a Kolab client together.

Tobias Koenig presented the new resource framework to the group. He made more progress on its implementation and started porting libkabc to the new framework.

Bo Thorsen and Steffen Hansen worked on various bugfixes of KMail and KOrganiser code and ported most of KMail/Kroupware to HEAD. They, together with Karl-Heinz Zimmer, answered many questions about the code they contributed for the Kroupware project.

Lutz Rogowski made some progress towards using KOrganizer as a KPart and familiarised himself with Kitchensync.

Cornelius Schumacher developed a concept for the iCalender parsing and worked on porting KOrganizer to the new resource framework.

Günter Schwann fixed a KParts bug and started on the "imap"-resource for KOrganizer.

Ingo Klöcker helped porting KMail/Kroupware to HEAD and did miscellaneous KMail cleanups. Marc Mutz worked on KMail, especially the IMAP account code and prepared and conducted several code merges to HEAD. Marc also helped to prepare the meeting.

Having many developers on site gave us the good opportunity to discuss the long standing questions whether to move KMail, KNode, Korn and related libraries to the kdepim module. The question was approached with structured discussion. In a first step, pro and con arguments were collected. Everybody had to wait for the second step to give their opinion on how to weight the arguments. In the end, consensus was reached and the move was favoured. More details on the results will be reported by the respective developers on the appropriate mailinglists.

This report is brought to you by Bernhard Reiter (of Intevation), who coordinated and moderated the meeting. Travel expenses and the hotel accommodations were paid for by Erfrakon, Klarälvdalens Datakonsult and Intevation, the companies behind the Kroupware project. Bandwidth, drinks and rooms were provided by Intevation.

A lot has happened since then:

• KMail, KNode, Korn and related libraries have been moved to the KDE PIM CVS module as planned
• Kaplan, now called Kontact (four screenshots are available), got an improved mechanism for configuration
• The resource framework is now completely in place
• Much code has been merged from the Kroupware Branch
• A new improved vCard parser has been written and has been committed to CVS along with some testcases for semi-automatic regression tests

Have a look at the KDE PIM homepage for further status reports.

Hold your breath for KDE 3.2!