Le samedi 17 novembre 2012 16:30:05 Duncan a écrit :
> Kevin Krammer posted on Sat, 17 Nov 2012 14:29:22 +0100 as excerpted:
> > On Saturday, 2012-11-17, Jerome Yuzyk wrote:
> >> With all the hassles added by Akonadi and Nepomuk and Strigi for some
> >> higher "social/semantic desktop" purpose, does anyone actually _use_
> >> the stuff?
> >
> > Of the above three mentioned technologies, only Nepomuk is part of
> > "semantic desktop".
> >
> > The other two, while being used by Nepomuk as data sources, have their
> > own, orthogonal, use cases.
>
> Yes. You mention strigi's. I'll mention akonadi. Like strigi it has
> its use case. In its case it's to unify the backend for the various
> kdepim apps, eventually saving time and maintenance effort by replacing
> multiple copies of contact information (for example) management code with
> a single copy.
>
> While in theory that should eventually be great, it does mean putting all
> the kdepim eggs in one (much more complicated) basket, making things much
> worse if that basket develops a hole, since now it's the data from all
> those apps at risk. Also, there's inevitable growing/change pains, and
> getting from here to there isn't an easy process.
Data is resource-dependent. A bug in akonadi doesn't necessarily put data at
risk, a bug in a resource does. In fact, akonadi bugs losing data are very
rare, most data loss bugs I've seen tracked down into one specific resource.
>
> The database backend is both the trouble and savior in many ways, as
> databases are notorious for causing "ordinary users" (and not so ordinary
> ones as well) quite the headaches, not always being perfectly reliable
> without "professional" management, etc. Sure, high-volume commercial
> stuff couldn't do without databases, but just to take mysql as an example
> since that was the first and probably most common akonadi backend, it's
> known for database version upgrades that need extra steps taken to manage
> the data format upgrades, and for such details as time and character-
> encoding (unicode/etc) format issues that database pros deal with and
> configure as a matter of course, but that simply aren't appropriate for
> end users to be dealing with. Yet that's now what end users will HAVE to
> deal with, as kde and mysql upgrade with their distro version, and they
> find their old contact information not making the upgrade in one piece
> with them.
IMO that is a distro QA problem. Being a Gentoo user too, reading news is all
I ever needed to do to keep my system clicking.
>
> Plus, if there's a bug, binary formats are notoriously difficult to
> repair and are arguably less robust, compared to "plain text" and perhaps
> XML for contact info, etc.
You should never have to worry about the akonadi database : it's only a cache.
This means that all the data is stored somewhere else (whether it be IMAP,
POP, maildir, carddir), and that data is plaintext (or whatever). Akonadi
resources only unify data sources.
>
> Five years down the line, it might be stable. Thunderbird and evolution
> both depend on database backends (sqlite I believe, now a choice for
> akonadi as well, tho it wasn't originally, and a lot of folks are still
> using the mysql backend) and they aren't considered /terribly/ unstable.
> But they've had years... the better part of a decade I guess... to
> mature. What are long-time kmail/kdepim users supposed to do while it's
> stabilizing? Basically, they're left either dealing with the problem as
> kdepim slowly stabilizes on akonadi, or switching to something more
> reliable in the mean time, from which many will never switch back.
>
just my $0.02 : akonadi/SQlite user here, works like a charm. (maybe slower
than with mysql, never benchmarked, also my email collection is "small"
compared to what I've heard from other people)
> And that's what we see, some people choosing to live with the problems,
> some people switching to other alternatives, from which many will never
> return even after kdepim on akonadi is long since stable.
>
> Was it worth it? The developers obviously thought it was worth the
> risk. Users like me are going elsewhere, likely never to return. Others
> suffer thru it, and there's always new users after the stabilization.
>
> But the answer those of us forced off have will be very different than
> that of the devs, and the new users who didn't have to live thru the
> upgrade.
IMO the akonadi change was worth it, I see possibilities everywhere with this
framework. I see you mentioned "lightweight mail client"; did you hear about
Trojita (IMAP only)?
Nepomuk is in serious lack of manpower; I know that I'll never be a big user
(tags/ratings et al aren't for me), but just for the timeline and music
ioslaves, it's worth it for me.
Regards,
Martin
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