On 17/08/2014 18:19, Mick wrote: > For me this plus the shift from KDEPIM 3 to 4 was criminal destruction of > value. I live in hope that one day KDE will take a hard long look at itself > and go back to KDE 3 architecture; or that nepomuk, akonadi, redland, mysql > and what-ever-else they have added can be switched off selectively without > breaking the ability to search your address book and send an email; or that > all this additional functionality will be so wonderfully streamlined that I > will never ever know it is there. Given it's been 4 or 5 years now since > this > disaster happened I am not holding my breath. :-(
In all honesty, I believe the semantic desktop idea was an experiment worth pursuing. Some things you just can't tell if they will work out in advance. You have to try. Correction: You have to be *brave*, then try. And KDE did that. I believe the entire KDE4 branch was incredibly brave - someone had a vision and had the balls to try, to rip out the problematic and hard-to-maintain bits and actually release something new. You could successfully argue that akonadi is a failed experiment in that it doesn't seem to make the individual user's life any easier. But akonadi wasn't just an exercise in stuffing everything into mysql because they could - akonadi aimed at putting a standard wrapper around PIM data. It's really a classic middle-ware idea which storage backends in the rear, possibly many clients in front and akonadi in the middle. The details of how to do the middle seem vastly more complex than anyone thought, and this is actually a good thing. A valuable lesson has been learned - devs now know a great deal more about what not to do and why. Same with nepomuk - it started as an EU-sponsored concept of a semantic desktop and KDE was brave enough to put themselves out there as a major DE willing to give it a shot. Valuable lessons were learned here as well, so whereas nepomuk may or may not survive, the lessons will always remain for those willing to look (yeah, I know about folk doomed to repeat, but you get the idea) Incidentally, much of KDE's fancy back end stuff *can* be disabled; it just isn't especially recommended and Gentoo devs don't support it too much. -- Alan McKinnon [email protected]
