13 Feb
2012
13 Feb
'12
5:07 a.m.
On Sun, 12 Feb 2012 20:06:59 -0800 (PST)
Darrell Anderson <humanreadable(a)yahoo.com> wrote:
This is the casual user's point
of view :)
In a developer's point of view, it is just re-using already existing
and debugged code.
There is a joke about mathematicians where there is a recipe for
cooking pasta:
-take an empty pan
-put water into it, then salt
-heat it until it boils, then put the pasta in the boiling water and
wait for N minutes until it's ready
Now, one hands the recipe to a mathematician, and a pan already filled
with water. What does the mathematician ?
They empty the pan, then apply blindly the recipe since it can now be
followed from the beginning.
But on the software-engineering side it doesn't only brings water waste
but also the advantages of an industrial-grade highly reliable SQL
database, not even mentioning the benefits of a common KDE PIM database.
Now that Akonadi works for me, I don't even see it in action: it
transparently "just works", exactly the way it should.
I could be
wrong but Akonadi's goal seems to be to simplify
kdepim data storage by using a standard DB engine that "just works"
instead of custom application-specific and mutually-incompatible
DB-like code. If it works, everything's fine and we will benefit
from advanced optimisations of SQL engines.
And from my own experience it finally works in KDE 4.8.
I understand the goal. Possibly even an admirable one. My resistance
is people who receive a couple of emails a day (people who manually
start and terminate KMail once or twice a day rather than run the app
all day), configure only a few RSS feeds that are fetched only every
few hours, configure a dozen or so events in KAlarm, and power down
every night rather than let the computer run 24/7, don't need or want
that kind of backend management. I appreciate how a backend caching
service could help share and manipulate data when the user is an
information junkie, but not when the user has no such need. For those
users Akonadi is a burden rather than an aide.
Of course, geeks and trolls believe that everybody should buy
bleeding edge hardware with gobs of RAM and CPU cycles to waste and
just STFU.
One not really needs to have a "bleeding edge hardware" to run
KDE4.
Unless you consider an €250 (without taxes) ultra-low-end box from 2004
being bleeding edge.