KDE PIM Sprint in Paris
Last weekend I attended this year's edition of the KDE PIM Sprint which, this time, took place in Paris.
I arrived in Paris around 1 p.m. and first walked from Gare du Nord to the Île de la Cité to have a look at the reconstructed roof of Notre Dame. Then I checked in at my hotel and after a brief rest I went to the sprint venue, the office of enioka. There I was greeted by one of our hosts for the weekend and by a few KDE PIMsters who had already taken over the meeting room.
After firing up my computer, KMail complained that it couldn't access one of my IMAP accounts. The error said "authentication failed" and a second error message claimed that access to KWallet (which stores the passwords of the IMAP accounts) was denied. Using the website of the mail provider I verified that my credentials still work. Adding the IMAP account a second time didn't help. Still the same errors. And a look at KWallet also didn't give me a clue why it should deny access to the password of one of my IMAP accounts when two other IMAP accounts worked. Since access to this IMAP account wasn't that important during the KDE PIM sprint I decided not to waste more time on this problem. This proved to be a good decision because once I was back at home the account magically worked again. I blame weird security measures by the email provider.
In the meantime more people had arrived and we went for dinner. Afterward we went back to the venue and, now that most people were there, we went over the list of topics from last year's KDE PIM Sprint. Some progress has been made since the last sprint but many topics didn't see much work done. Any and all help is welcome!
Originally I planned to look into a bug that's been haunting me for some time: KMail shows seemingly random counts of unread messages in the folder list that have little to do with the actual number of unread messages in those folders. Because I'm using the latest stable versions of almost all KDE software (as provided by openSUSE Tumbleweed) I started to build the release/25.12 branch of KMail and its 30+ KDE PIM dependencies. This took the rest of Friday evening and part of Saturday morning. Shortly before midnight we called it a day.
On Saturday morning, after a joint breakfast in the office, we discussed a few more topics from our agenda. After that I decided to scratch my original plan and, instead, to help with making the KMime library fit for becoming a KDE Framework. I created a few MRs to replace the usage of bool parameters in the API with enums. Then I looked into adapting the users of KMime to the new API. Unfortunately, this proved more painful than expected because KDE PIM does not only depend on the master branch of everything else in KDE PIM (which I was very well aware of) but a lot of the KDE PIM projects also depend on the master branch of the ktextaddons library which is a kind of intermediate library between KDE Frameworks and KDE PIM with its own release schedule. For many of the KDE PIM projects I could simply lower the required version of ktextaddons to the latest stable release (as shipped by Tumbleweed), but for pimcommon this hack didn't work anymore because it used a new header from ktextaddons master. By then it was already Sunday afternoon and anyway time for me to pack my stuff.
On my way to Gare du Nord I passed by Sacré Cœur on Montmartre where to my surprise a choir of Santa Clauses and Santa Claudettes was performing French Christmas songs.
In conclusion, I got more useful work done during this sprint than during some other sprints, although the dependency requirements of KDE PIM annoy me a lot. I've been involved in KDE PIM for 25 years now although, admittedly, I rarely contribute to it in my spare time since I started to code for a living. To a large part the reason for this is that it would cost way too much of my spare time to build all of KDE PIM all of the time.
Thanks to enioka for hosting us and to Kevin for organizing the sprint. And many thanks to those of you donating to KDE which makes these sprints possible.