Report from the Decibel Hackathon
At the Decibel Hackathon sponsored by NLnet and basysKom GmbH in Darmstadt, Germany last weekend, hackers from the KDE community met to discuss the handling of contact data in KDE 4. Read on for a summary of the event.
First Tobias Hunger (Decibel) and Will Stephenson (Kopete) described the needs of their projects for data storage. Then Volker Krause from Akonadi gave an introduction to their data storage system, followed by a presentation on the Khalkhi framework done by Friedrich Kossebau. With these presentations forming a basis for the further discussions we were able to define workflows to handle contact data across the new frameworks involved in KDE 4. Dominik Haumann (Kate), Duncan Mac-Vicar (Kopete), Geert Vlastuin (not involved with open source projects before) and Stanislav Karchebny (Skype) provided valuable input, addressing needs they forsee from their own perspective.
More tangible results of the meeting include updates to Decibel's as well as QtTapioca's build system to work on Decibel to make it optionally a KDE component as well as a pure Qt application, fixes for several warnings found, as well as stability improvements. Further details can be found in the blog posts by Will, Duncan, Stanislav and Tobias.
The event was a success, fostering the integration of different KDE technologies and improving the interaction between developers on a personal level over some beer and pizza on Saturday evening.