KDE PIM November Sprint

In early 2013, it was established that "Osnabrück is not a place". Meaning that the KDE PIM spring sprint, which traditionally takes place in Osnabrück, could happen at a different location and still be a continuation of the tradition.

KDE PIM's autumn sprint has traditionally been in Berlin, but since the team decided that "Berlin is not a place" applies as well, this year's installment of the sprint took place in Brno in the Czech Republic.

Even people without the exceptional skills of Sherlock Holmes have certainly deduced by now that KDE PIM sprints happen in cities that are not places but coincidentally contain the letters B, R and N.

Now, without further procrastination, the story about the KDE PIM autumn sprint, brought to you by KDE e.V., Red Hat and the letters B, R and N.

Early birds

Unlike with most other sprints, where all but some local people arrive on the first day of the sprint, there had already been a week of intense KDE hacking been going on.

Bob - you remember Bob? - and his merry henchmen from the KDE Barcelona Squad, had already arrived earlier that week and hacked on various pieces of KDE software and had beer delivered to them on trains. Yes, trains! That's the Czech Republic for you.

Notes

We're sorry to have to notify you of the fact that nobody worked on KNotes. There were plenty of old school sticky notes though. Because Kevin Ottens likes to draw rectangles on white boards and sticky notes are a natural choice for filling them.

There were also a lot of notes taken, notably on the outcome of the discussions which were scheduled by moving notes on the whiteboard.

This kind of structured handling of topics is a noteworthy improvement over some of the previous sprints and very necessary given the increased number of people who nowadays attend and take note of them.

Bugs

As has become tradition, a significant portion of the meeting was dedicated to mercilessly squashing those nasty little buggers. David Faure, a man who certainly needs no further introduction, used the presence of several component maintainers to get issues fixed. "Getting fixed" meaning he did the actual fixing, being aided by the aforementioned component specialists with insight into inner workings and assumptions of the respective code.

The previous and current maintainers of Akonadi had fun with things so deep down in the guts of the system that not even the author of this article would be able to fully understand them. Those people are way smarter than him!

In addition to fixes in the sense of correcting erroneous behavior, this also included several improvements in the area of runtime performance. And a faster KDE PIM makes everybody happy.

Progress

One of the other fun aspects of a sprint, aside from the obvious awesomeness of hanging out with great people and doing interesting code work, is to ponder and prototype potential progressive programming pieces.Mark Gaiser, Michael Bohlender and Thomas Pfeiffer had a closer look at how to get beyond quaint, dare I say boring, user interfaces and enable QtQuick-based applications to tap into the power provided by KDE PIM libraries. Some example code was written, plans were drawn - but much is still to be done.

Secrets

Naturally the presence of the KDE Barcelona Squad made secrecy a paramount objective. Not only do we need to hide their identities, a job made easy by several Squad members disguising themselves with enormous fake beards, we are bound by oath—under threat of dragonian punishment—to not talk about rocket science like advances in PIM data search. Well, "rocket science" doesn't even cut it, more likely on the level of warp science!

Editor's note: recent leaks have nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with our ability to keep things, you know, secret. Really!