DEC
2
2009
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Akonadi porting explainedFor quite some time almost every blog by a KDE PIM developer is about Akonadi in one for or the other, often about "Akonadi porting" or "porting to Akonadi". Akonadi itself can already be difficult to explain, combined with "porting" it probably has only meaning left if you are a developer. The thing anyone else will be able to extract are delays. For example an initial guess was to have KAddressBook and KOrganizer ported in time for the 4.3 release, but lack of resources meant we didn't even get to start working on KOrganizer in any significant form and the new KAddressBook would lack some features. So what is all this porting business actually about and why does it take so long? Imagine a situation where you want to cook something (well, you can imagine anything els of course, but it will greatly improve the understanding of the following example if you restrict your fantasy to cooking for now). After you've decided what you want to cook, you'll have to get your ingredients, which usually means going out for shopping. When you get home, probably after quite some time and travelled distance, you'll have to prepare these ingredients (wash, peel, chop, etc.) and then start the actual cooking. That works pretty well, millions of people do between that once in a while and every day. On one of those lazy sunday afternoons you read about outsourcing and immediately convince your fellow cooks to outsource shopping to a shopping specialist. However, you discover that you have to adjust your approach to cooking to accomodate for this for of ingredient acquisition. Switching to a different reality there is this cook called KMail (in this reality cooks are, for an unknown reason, actually called "mail user agents"). But again the shopping for "messages" at shops called "servers", with owners of sometimes questionable character, low quality offerings and so on, is making KMail's life unpleasent. Unfortunately our cook KMail discovers, while adjusting to the different cooking approach, that all these years of shopping had resulted in acquiring certain habits (in another reality, the author of this blog has the habit of not using shopping lists because eventually he'll recognize things to buy at the shop anyway). Habits that need to be unlearned or replaced by habits which fit the new situation better. Habits our cook might not have been aware of or vowed never to think about again. It takes time, but it is totally worth it. |
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