On Sun, 12 Feb 2012 20:06:59 -0800 (PST) Darrell Anderson humanreadable@yahoo.com wrote:
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.
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.
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.