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.