NOV
19
2008

Akonadi goodness without moving even a finger

Submitted by krake

Sound like magic you say?

I'd say you're right!

The White Wizard (also known as Volker Krause) has embedded a powerful spell in the KResource framework which summons a golem (also known as kres-migrator) and commands it to carefully transform your contact and calendar resources into a respective Akonadi setup.

As of last night the magical barrier holding the spell's power has been removed, so that all brave souls testing our snapshots and the upcoming 4.2 beta1 can help us improve the minion's capabilities to everbody's satisfaction.

Since a carefully crafted illusion is more popular with the common folks than just songs and stories, lets see what we can do about that.

address book before migration
KAddressBook when started with a traditional setup: three KResource plugins for different data backends.

Akonadi startup progress
Progress of Akonadi server startup

migration report
Report of the migration results: The "dir" and "LDAP" plugin based resources have been migrated using our compatibility bridges, the "file" plugin based resource has been migrated to the native Akonadi VCard handler.

addressbook after migration
KAddressBook after the migration: a new Akonadi based plugin containing all three data sources as "folders". The three traditional plugins are still present but have been deactivated.

Beware! The dark side hasn't slept either!
We have heard rumors that the following jinx can put an unholy barrier around our spell, effectively keeping the poor victim deprived of any Akonadi goodness:

% kwriteconfig --file kres-migratorrc --group Migration --key Enabled --type bool false

Comments

when i watched your screencast (i think it was yours, right?) about using the kderesources<->akonadi bridge stuff and doing all the set up by hand all i could think was, "that's freaking awesome .. but almost useless because it's waaay too hard for people to figure out". i figured at some point you guys would get to the point where you could start putting frosting on the cake, and Huzzah! here you are!

this looks awesome.

oh, and the blog entry itself? freaking hilarious. we should do a "DnD on the planet" day where everyone writes like this in their next blog entry ;)

By Aaron J. Seigo at Thu, 11/20/2008 - 01:40

At the time I did the screencast we already had the migrator tool, but it still had to be invoked manually.

At the Akonadi Sprint in Essen earlier this month we discussed a couple of options on how to do that automatically.

Running as part of startkde has the disadvantage that it only runs for full KDE sessions and might not be finished before the first KResource using application is started.

Running it as an autostart program has similar problems.

So the idea came up to implement it somewhere inside the KResource framework, so the first application using a certain type of KResource would start the migrator.

We might have to tune this a bit, probably with help of the main applications using KResources.

By krake at Thu, 11/20/2008 - 17:33

I see a problem with address books. I don't usually activate/deactivate/add/remove them. Like most users I never touched that. Would be interesting a way to classify my contacts in tags/categories but that's not a solution. I think application could be more usable if Address Books list were included in configuration dialogs and not in application default view.

What happened with Distributions Lists? Nice to have more space for contacts. Are shown together with contacts? (That's another feature request)

By brainsqueezer at Wed, 12/10/2008 - 18:53