Lindsay Haisley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> posted
[EMAIL PROTECTED], excerpted below, on  Fri, 20 Jun
2008 12:27:14 -0500:

> On Fri, 2008-06-20 at 16:55 +0000, Duncan wrote:
>> FWIW, I prefer newsgroups and thus use gmane.org to follow most of my
>> mailing lists as newsgroups.

> Are you talking about Usenet newsgroups?  Usenet is a service I expected
> to die a natural death _years_ ago!  Talk about an Internet service that
> doesn't scale well ....!

That's it... but it's actually reasonable when used as originally 
intended, for /text/ groups, or in this case text mailing lists.  There 
are many more or less hobbyists out there running text-only news 
servers.  Gmane.org is one, tho it's rather different than others in that 
it's not a regular news server, but a list2news (and back) gateway.  
Users connect to the server and subscribe to newsgroups, which they can 
read.  Posting is allowed to most, with gmane forwarding the post to the 
list as it would to the moderator of a moderated newsgroup.  Of course, 
because it's a gateway to a list, the list posting rules apply, so if the 
list requires subscription to post, than the post won't go thru unless 
you've subscribed to the list as well.  Most users do so, then drop to 
"vacation mode", where they can post but don't get the mailings, since 
they participate thru gmane.  I do all my gentoo lists as gmane groups, 
thus keeping my mail client free of the routine post clutter.

Back to your scaling thing, tho, if newsgroups are used for binary, then 
yes, there's somewhat of a scaling problem.  However, there are 
advantages as well.  But this really isn't the thread for that discussion.
 
> I have a lot of "ought to"s here and a severe shortage of
> round tuits :-)

Heh, don't we all?
 
> I see that Gentoo is stable at KDE 3.5.9, which I have as an alternative
> from my gdm login (and which my desktop just spent many hours
> re-emerging).  I'll take a look at it.  Thanks for the encouragement.

Pardon a bit of boasting here.  Quad-cores (here, as 2x dual-core 2.8 GHz 
Opteron 290s) running 4+ gigs memory (here 8 gig) with PORTAGE_TMPDIR 
pointed at a tmpfs so all the compiling is done in RAM...  Those "many 
hours" you speak of tend to shrink down to ~4 hours for a full KDE 
remerge.  When I was trying the KDE4 SVN builds and thus had already 
compiled most of it, if I recompiled every day or two, it'd run 1-2 
hours, and that's while continuing to use the system normally, including 
playing streaming Internet radio with moderate visualization running 
too.  That's actually quite reasonable -- so much so that I had far more 
trouble finding the time to actually test the builds than to compile them.

It was then that I realized... in a couple years, when quad-core and 2-4 
gigs RAM is normal, the current big difference, the compile time, between 
source based distributions like Gentoo, and binary distributions like 
Fedora and Ubuntu, will pretty much disappear, because it'll take as much 
or more time to configure and try out new apps, as it will to compile 
them, and even when doing the long compiles, compiling will be a 
background task that doesn't interfere with whatever else one is doing.  
At that point, what is now the big time difference between source and 
binary distributions will disappear, and all the much smaller differences 
as one typically sees in evaluations of the various binary distributions 
will come to the fore.  It'll be interesting to see how that affects the 
distribution landscape.

(OTOH, trends in the opposite hardware direction, toward netbooks/umpcs 
and the like, may negate this.  Still, it's likely enough many people 
will have a decently powered home system to do the compiling, and then 
just install binpkgs on their netbooks.  Right now I'm planning on 
getting an Acer Aspire One later this summer, sticking in one of those 
120 gig Supertalent SATA SSDs now available for <$650 @ newegg, and using 
it for an MP3 player plus netbook.  I plan on doing a chroot Gentoo/~x86 
on my main machine for compiling, using FEATURES=binpkg, and then 
installing from binpkg on the AA1.)

> Question:  Can I run Evolution on KDE?  the gnome people kind of adopted
> Evolution, like they absorbed Eautilus, from Ximian.  I have a lot of
> time and work involved in setting up my mail and contact data which I
> doubt would translate to Kontact/KMail without additional substantial
> work.  Does Kontact support address collections on an LDAP server?

I use kmail standalone, not in kontact.  It's decent on POP3 which is 
what I'm using it for, and works for system mail too (I have it setup to 
check a system maildir folder into which I have scripts that deposit my 
cron run mail and etc, so I don't have to run a full system SMTP setup)  
but still gets mixed reviews on IMAP.  Evolution should run fine on KDE 
tho I've not run it, but of course being a GNOME app, it'll bring with it 
all sorts of GNOME dependencies.  Hopefully someone who has tried it can 
fill in more details for you.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman

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