Re: [kde] Has the KDE Social/Semantic Desktop been worth the hassle to anyone?
On Saturday, 2012-11-17, Rafa Griman wrote: Hi :) On Sat, Nov 17, 2012 at 11:44 AM, Anne Wilson cannewil...@googlemail.com wrote: Even that doesn't appeal to me, but looking at the number of facebook and twitter users, it probably would appeal to many. I agree. That's why I think it is a good idea and that maybe if there was the possibility to activa/deactivate it, there would have been less hassle and grumbling. Semantic desktop is a deactivatable option in the KDE settings UI. One can even turn of file indexing individually. Cheers, Kevin -- Kevin Krammer, KDE developer, xdg-utils developer KDE user support, developer mentoring signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part. ___ This message is from the kde mailing list. Account management: https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde. Archives: http://lists.kde.org/. More info: http://www.kde.org/faq.html.
Re: [kde] Has the KDE Social/Semantic Desktop been worth the hassle to anyone?
On Sunday, 2012-11-18, Duncan wrote: I read something from one of the kde devs, I'm not sure where or which dev, but... They mentioned that the reason the semantic desktop stuff got as BIG a push as it did, back with early kde4, was that one of the European governments had sponsored the work with a grant (they said which government but I'm USian so forgot that detail, IIRC it was primarily city or region, tho, not national, tho national might have been match- funding). It (Nepomuk) was an EU research project. The KDE part is actually just one of several research deliveries, called Nepomuk-desktop IIRC: One of the participating companies, Mandriva, was responsible for that part of the work and hired Sebastian Trüg to do it. He's now working for the company producing Virtuoso but doesn't have much time for work on Nepomuk-KDE. Fortunately, Vishesh Handa, one of KDE's Google Summer of Code students who worked on Nepomuk-KDE as part of GSOC, took over maintainership a while ago and is now (very recently) employed by Blue Systems to work on Nepomuk-KDE pretty much full time. Some of the non-code research deliverables, e.g. semantic ontologies, are being used by other projects as well, e.g. tracker. Cheers, Kevin -- Kevin Krammer, KDE developer, xdg-utils developer KDE user support, developer mentoring signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part. ___ This message is from the kde mailing list. Account management: https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde. Archives: http://lists.kde.org/. More info: http://www.kde.org/faq.html.
Re: [kde] Has the KDE Social/Semantic Desktop been worth the hassle to anyone?
On Sunday, 2012-11-18, Duncan wrote: It ends up being a distro QA issue, but really, the problem is above the distro. I've seen at least one kde dev mention that had they known about mysql when they chose it as the first stable backend, what they know about it now, the choice may well have been different, even tho the reason mysql was first was because it was more ready than the others (sqlite, the newer default, wasn't properly thread-safe at the time, work had to be done to make it so, postgresql has AFAIK remained experimental the whole time, I'm not sure why, but it apparently has issues that aren't easy to fix, virtuoso was AFAIK very new and kde was the first big project to use it like that...). SQLite has always been thread-safe but it used (and I think still uses) a global lock do achieve that, meaning all access has to be serialized (one after the other). The other engines can do concurrent access if the operations are independent enough. So it is more a matter of throughput than correctness. Virtuoso would be a very obvious choice for an Akonadi setup running as part of a KDE setup, however when last tried it or rather its SQL driver still wasn't up to the job. For this and other similar reasons, had they the chance to do it over again, had they known about all these mysql complications, they'd have likely waited until sqlite got its thread-safe updates that have allowed it to be the new default. As far as I know the default has remained unchanged as far as upstream is concerned. Naturally any party in the chain from software vendor to user could have decided to use a different default and if so has have taken care to ensure a proper migration path. But, there's another wrench thrown into the works for akonadi and mysql as well. Unlike most of the rest of kde, where system defaults don't normally get written to the user config, only changes FROM the system defaults, in the akonadi case, it writes the backend used into the user configuration as well. This is true for KDE programs because of their use of KDE's config handling framework KConfig. Akonadi, not being a KDE application, doesn't have access to that and the Qt configuration handling system, QSettings, doesn't have that capability. Which creates a problem, because normally, system upgrades don't touch the user's home dir or the user configuration details stored therein. So guess what. When the upstream and most distros default switched to the now ready sqlite backend, many users continued using the old mysql backend, along with its more complicated issues, because the backend choice is written into the user's own configuration, even if they never changed it from the system default. So the system default changes, but the user specified configuration doesn't change with it. Normally that's a good thing, because the user specified configuration was a change FROM the default, thus something the user did deliberately. Unfortunately in this case... If a switch in default backend would have to propagate to the user installations, this would require some changes in the user home directories as well (moving stuff from one database to another). I am quite certain that the upstream default regarding backend hasn't changed, so any distribution changing the default will either have deployed a migration process of some sort anyway or leave existing setups untouched by choice in order not to have to. Cheers, Kevin -- Kevin Krammer, KDE developer, xdg-utils developer KDE user support, developer mentoring signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part. ___ This message is from the kde mailing list. Account management: https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde. Archives: http://lists.kde.org/. More info: http://www.kde.org/faq.html.
Re: [kde] Has the KDE Social/Semantic Desktop been worth the hassle to anyone?
On Sunday 18 November 2012 11.52:58 Kevin Krammer wrote: Virtuoso would be a very obvious choice for an Akonadi setup running as part of a KDE setup, however when last tried it or rather its SQL driver still wasn't up to the job. On a totally non-technical point: With virtuoso being neo-proprietary, I would also think it would be better strategy to move further away from it, and not more into it. So if anything, it would be good to have an actual Free Software database that can do the jobs that virtuoso and MySQL currently do. With the situation of both databases, it currently appears that neither virtuoso nor MySQL would be the sustainable choice to make, though. Best regards, Georg -- Georg C. F. Greve gr...@fsfe.org http://www.linkedin.com/in/GeorgGreve http://blogs.fsfe.org/greve/ http://identi.ca/greve signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part. ___ This message is from the kde mailing list. Account management: https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde. Archives: http://lists.kde.org/. More info: http://www.kde.org/faq.html.
Re: [kde] Has the KDE Social/Semantic Desktop been worth the hassle to anyone?
On Sunday, 2012-11-18, Martin (KDE) wrote: Am 18.11.2012 11:52, schrieb Kevin Krammer: If a switch in default backend would have to propagate to the user installations, this would require some changes in the user home directories as well (moving stuff from one database to another). I am quite certain that the upstream default regarding backend hasn't changed, so any distribution changing the default will either have deployed a migration process of some sort anyway or leave existing setups untouched by choice in order not to have to. Hm, I am a little bit astonished here. If the data in the mysql database is cache only data, then simply changing the configuration should do the trick. I would have two caches laying around, but thats it. True for the read cache, not so true for the write cache. What do I have to migrate then? For example there could be data that has not yet been written to its backend. That would be the case if Akonadi is shut down (e.g. due to logout) while one of the resources that had user changes was not online (e.g. could not connect to its server). There could also be meta data that a backend was not able to handle itself, e.g. read/unread status of emails from an mbox file. While discarding of meta data would be no more than an annoyance, discarding of uncommitted changes could be (an uncommitted deleted would be just an annoyance and uncommitted add not so much). Cheers, Kevin -- Kevin Krammer, KDE developer, xdg-utils developer KDE user support, developer mentoring signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part. ___ This message is from the kde mailing list. Account management: https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde. Archives: http://lists.kde.org/. More info: http://www.kde.org/faq.html.
Re: [kde] Has the KDE Social/Semantic Desktop been worth the hassle to anyone?
Am 18.11.2012 20:05, schrieb Kevin Krammer: On Sunday, 2012-11-18, Martin (KDE) wrote: Am 18.11.2012 11:52, schrieb Kevin Krammer: If a switch in default backend would have to propagate to the user installations, this would require some changes in the user home directories as well (moving stuff from one database to another). I am quite certain that the upstream default regarding backend hasn't changed, so any distribution changing the default will either have deployed a migration process of some sort anyway or leave existing setups untouched by choice in order not to have to. Hm, I am a little bit astonished here. If the data in the mysql database is cache only data, then simply changing the configuration should do the trick. I would have two caches laying around, but thats it. True for the read cache, not so true for the write cache. What do I have to migrate then? For example there could be data that has not yet been written to its backend. That would be the case if Akonadi is shut down (e.g. due to logout) while one of the resources that had user changes was not online (e.g. could not connect to its server). There could also be meta data that a backend was not able to handle itself, e.g. read/unread status of emails from an mbox file. While discarding of meta data would be no more than an annoyance, discarding of uncommitted changes could be (an uncommitted deleted would be just an annoyance and uncommitted add not so much). So, if I want to switch from mysql to sqlite I have to - stop akonadi - wait a few seconds to let akonadi sync - switch to sqlite - start akonadi With imap and maildir all should be the same as before. Is there a backup thingy that creates pure sql statements to migrate the data? Regards Martin Cheers, Kevin ___ This message is from the kde mailing list. Account management: https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde. Archives: http://lists.kde.org/. More info: http://www.kde.org/faq.html. ___ This message is from the kde mailing list. Account management: https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde. Archives: http://lists.kde.org/. More info: http://www.kde.org/faq.html.
Re: [kde] Has the KDE Social/Semantic Desktop been worth the hassle to anyone?
On Sunday, 2012-11-18, Martin (KDE) wrote: Am 18.11.2012 20:05, schrieb Kevin Krammer: On Sunday, 2012-11-18, Martin (KDE) wrote: What do I have to migrate then? For example there could be data that has not yet been written to its backend. That would be the case if Akonadi is shut down (e.g. due to logout) while one of the resources that had user changes was not online (e.g. could not connect to its server). There could also be meta data that a backend was not able to handle itself, e.g. read/unread status of emails from an mbox file. While discarding of meta data would be no more than an annoyance, discarding of uncommitted changes could be (an uncommitted deleted would be just an annoyance and uncommitted add not so much). So, if I want to switch from mysql to sqlite I have to - check that there aren't any unsaved changes. all resources must be online, no Akonadi clients attempt changes anymore, the resource's change recorder files are empty. - stop akonadi - wait a few seconds to let akonadi sync - switch to sqlite - start akonadi With imap and maildir all should be the same as before. Data should be the same as before for all backends, meta data will vary depending on backend. Is there a backup thingy that creates pure sql statements to migrate the data? I doubt that SQL dumped from MySQL will be understood by anything other than MySQL. I think the Akonaditray utility can trigger a MySQL dump, the mysql client or any MySQL GUI can most likely do the same. Cheers, Kevin -- Kevin Krammer, KDE developer, xdg-utils developer KDE user support, developer mentoring signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part. ___ This message is from the kde mailing list. Account management: https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde. Archives: http://lists.kde.org/. More info: http://www.kde.org/faq.html.
Re: [kde] Has the KDE Social/Semantic Desktop been worth the hassle to anyone?
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On 17/11/2012 09:16, Rafa Griman wrote: Well Duncan, I agree with you in that there are two types of people, that I _don't_ like the semantic desktop and I'm also a Gentoo user (and Archer). But, IMHO, the devs could have made it possible to deactivate the semantic desktop for those who don't need/like it. I'm saying could and not should, IOW: not giving orders, it's just MHO ;) I think the problem is that you are wrong about this. I think Akonadi has been so deeply coded in that it was not possible to have it deactivated and the applications still run. Having two versions of applications to maintain is obviously overload on the developers. Personally I'd be happier without it - but I much prefer optional things. I like to organise my work as it suits me, so searching in that sense has no value to me. The big dream, though, was to make information cross-application (which naturally means cross-platform too) for any application that finds the information useful. Even that doesn't appeal to me, but looking at the number of facebook and twitter users, it probably would appeal to many. Anne -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.12 (MingW32) Comment: Using GnuPG with undefined - http://www.enigmail.net/ iEYEARECAAYFAlCnanEACgkQj93fyh4cnBdDkACePIzP8Xl22g9NO52a0AdisQ5b uasAmQGsxZEcxUP8gbKPXRt8KlhJLsNQ =QEGd -END PGP SIGNATURE- ___ This message is from the kde mailing list. Account management: https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde. Archives: http://lists.kde.org/. More info: http://www.kde.org/faq.html.
Re: [kde] Has the KDE Social/Semantic Desktop been worth the hassle to anyone?
On Saturday 17 November 2012 07:00:27 Anne Wilson did opine: On 17/11/2012 09:16, Rafa Griman wrote: Well Duncan, I agree with you in that there are two types of people, that I _don't_ like the semantic desktop and I'm also a Gentoo user (and Archer). But, IMHO, the devs could have made it possible to deactivate the semantic desktop for those who don't need/like it. I'm saying could and not should, IOW: not giving orders, it's just MHO ;) I think the problem is that you are wrong about this. I think Akonadi has been so deeply coded in that it was not possible to have it deactivated and the applications still run. Having two versions of applications to maintain is obviously overload on the developers. Personally I'd be happier without it - but I much prefer optional things. I like to organise my work as it suits me, so searching in that sense has no value to me. The big dream, though, was to make information cross-application (which naturally means cross-platform too) for any application that finds the information useful. Even that doesn't appeal to me, but looking at the number of facebook and twitter users, it probably would appeal to many. Anne While I OTOH, view sites like that as potential security leakage vectors. They want sign up info that IMO is none of their business. Cheers, Gene -- There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order. -Ed Howdershelt (Author) My web page: http://coyoteden.dyndns-free.com:85/gene is up! Nothing shortens a journey so pleasantly as an account of misfortunes at which the hearer is permitted to laugh. -- Quentin Crisp ___ This message is from the kde mailing list. Account management: https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde. Archives: http://lists.kde.org/. More info: http://www.kde.org/faq.html.
Re: [kde] Has the KDE Social/Semantic Desktop been worth the hassle to anyone?
On Friday, November 16, 2012 11:33:04 PM Duncan 1i5t5.dun...@cox.net wrote: Jerome Yuzyk posted on Fri, 16 Nov 2012 19:23:50 -0700 as excerpted: So what's happening with this grand vision? My honest opinion? In general, it's a tool for those that really aren't comfortable with traditional computers and the way they work. The kind that has so many icons on their (traditional icon-based) desktop they don't all fit, because that's the only place they can find things. It does seem to me though, that these folks are the _least_ likely to put up with the troubles involved in actually using the technology. I doubt whether they're the ones that (care to) know to restart Akonadi whenever KMail starts misbehaving, or who will tolerate not being able to see image previews in Konqueror or Dolphin anymore, or will track down where their KAddressbook data went. But maybe this is the wrong place to ask my original question, rephrased: For whom is all this KDE4-based magic actually of benefit? The average user who can't make folders to organize the piles of stuff they collect is likewise not a user that will navigate through the various gotchas and misfeatures and brokenness resulting from the migration to whatever KDE devs decided to embark on the wholesale changes made to KDE4. And, judging from the lack of articles and tutorials newer than circa 2009 about what to do with the New Improved KDE suggests that even its proponents don't have much to say about it either. We're at least 3 years into KDE4 and I assume well past its birthing pains and I still cannot see why the hassle of breaking so many KDE3 things was worth it. Will it still take another 3 years? Fans of the changes - I'd like to know what I'm missing out on. KDE4 today looks pretty much like KDE 3.5.10 did years ago, except for the things it used to do back then that it isn't doing today, and the extra screwing around I and others have to do to make it work like it used to back then. How has the upheaval and developer energy and use patience-testing been worth it? ___ This message is from the kde mailing list. Account management: https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde. Archives: http://lists.kde.org/. More info: http://www.kde.org/faq.html.
Re: [kde] Has the KDE Social/Semantic Desktop been worth the hassle to anyone?
On Saturday, 2012-11-17, Jerome Yuzyk wrote: With all the hassles added by Akonadi and Nepomuk and Strigi for some higher social/semantic desktop purpose, does anyone actually _use_ the stuff? Ok, this is basically the second part of [1] Similar to how Strigi is tasked with providing meta data in a uniform way across a wide spectrum of file formats, Akonadi is tasked with providing data access in a uniform way across a wide spectrum of data storage formats and locations. Also similar to Strigi, this involves libraries which can also be used directly by applications, but, again, are most often used indirectly through a service. As I wrote in my reply to Duncan's reaction to [1], KDE developers will often prefer a service based approach due to some qualities and advantages inherent in it and being a time proven option widely used on Unix like operating systems. As a matter of fact it is no conicidence that both major providers [2] of Free Software infrastructure for end user programs are using that approach while direct backend access is employed by stand-alone application providers. Anyway, the topic at hand is the relation ship of this particular technology with semantic desktop and the point is that its usefulness and goals are independent of that. I see Georg has just explained that as well, but I guess I can't hurt to repeat: semantic desktop builds upon technologies such as Akonadi and Strigi, but they serve a wider range of purposes than just that or in other words, semantic desktop is one of their additional usage scenarios. Cheers, Kevin [1] http://lists.kde.org/?l=kdem=135315899718567w=2 [2] KDE and GNOME -- Kevin Krammer, KDE developer, xdg-utils developer KDE user support, developer mentoring signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part. ___ This message is from the kde mailing list. Account management: https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde. Archives: http://lists.kde.org/. More info: http://www.kde.org/faq.html.
Re: [kde] Has the KDE Social/Semantic Desktop been worth the hassle to anyone?
Hi :) On Sat, Nov 17, 2012 at 11:44 AM, Anne Wilson cannewil...@googlemail.com wrote: -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On 17/11/2012 09:16, Rafa Griman wrote: Well Duncan, I agree with you in that there are two types of people, that I _don't_ like the semantic desktop and I'm also a Gentoo user (and Archer). But, IMHO, the devs could have made it possible to deactivate the semantic desktop for those who don't need/like it. I'm saying could and not should, IOW: not giving orders, it's just MHO ;) I think the problem is that you are wrong about this. I think Akonadi has been so deeply coded in that it was not possible to have it deactivated and the applications still run. Having two versions of applications to maintain is obviously overload on the developers. As I said in my previous e-mail: I'm no coder and I know there are limited resources. That's why I greatly respect the hard work all the KDE devs have put into KDE in general. I imagine that it's not easy to have two versions due to the lack of developers and time. That's why I said could as in it would have been nice. But that's all. Personally I'd be happier without it - but I much prefer optional things. I like to organise my work as it suits me, so searching in that sense has no value to me. The big dream, though, was to make information cross-application (which naturally means cross-platform too) for any application that finds the information useful. I agree, the idea was a good one (specially for non-geeks ;) and that's what counts. I imgine that as time goes by, things will get polished (they are very much better now than at the beginning). That's why I try KMail2 once in a while. The day I don't have any more issues, I'll switch to it happily. I know the devs will get there :) Even that doesn't appeal to me, but looking at the number of facebook and twitter users, it probably would appeal to many. I agree. That's why I think it is a good idea and that maybe if there was the possibility to activa/deactivate it, there would have been less hassle and grumbling. In any case, to all the KDE devs, I think you're doing a great job !! So big thanks to all of you for your time !!! Rafa ___ This message is from the kde mailing list. Account management: https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde. Archives: http://lists.kde.org/. More info: http://www.kde.org/faq.html.
Re: [kde] Has the KDE Social/Semantic Desktop been worth the hassle to anyone?
Martin Bednar posted on Sat, 17 Nov 2012 18:13:58 +0100 as excerpted: Le samedi 17 novembre 2012 16:30:05 Duncan a écrit : Kevin Krammer posted on Sat, 17 Nov 2012 14:29:22 +0100 as excerpted: On Saturday, 2012-11-17, Jerome Yuzyk wrote: With all the hassles added by Akonadi and Nepomuk and Strigi for some higher social/semantic desktop purpose, does anyone actually _use_ the stuff? The database backend is both the trouble and savior in many ways, as databases are notorious for causing ordinary users (and not so ordinary ones as well) quite the headaches, not always being perfectly reliable without professional management, etc. Sure, high-volume commercial stuff couldn't do without databases, but just to take mysql as an example since that was the first and probably most common akonadi backend, it's known for database version upgrades that need extra steps taken to manage the data format upgrades, and for such details as time and character- encoding (unicode/etc) format issues that database pros deal with and configure as a matter of course, but that simply aren't appropriate for end users to be dealing with. Yet that's now what end users will HAVE to deal with, as kde and mysql upgrade with their distro version, and they find their old contact information not making the upgrade in one piece with them. IMO that is a distro QA problem. Being a Gentoo user too, reading news is all I ever needed to do to keep my system clicking. It ends up being a distro QA issue, but really, the problem is above the distro. I've seen at least one kde dev mention that had they known about mysql when they chose it as the first stable backend, what they know about it now, the choice may well have been different, even tho the reason mysql was first was because it was more ready than the others (sqlite, the newer default, wasn't properly thread-safe at the time, work had to be done to make it so, postgresql has AFAIK remained experimental the whole time, I'm not sure why, but it apparently has issues that aren't easy to fix, virtuoso was AFAIK very new and kde was the first big project to use it like that...). The primary reason (I believe) is because mysql doesn't guarantee database compatibility between versions (they have seperate maintenance release series that remain compatible within the series, but consider people like me that were using pre-akonadi kmail for nearing a decade, across multiple distros and of course many upgrades, such series eventually simply fall so far behind current that it's impractical for a distro to continue shipping them). There's generally a conversion process available, and the big database sites do it first with a test installation, then setup a new system with it and test it, then migrate production to the new/tested setup, but that's not the type of thing joe blow end user can be expected to do, across tens of thousands of joe blow end users. So at some point when whatever mysql series people started with is upgraded, all those people still on mysql as their akonadi backend are going to have a problem. In addition to that, there's at least two separate issues (as I mentioned) related to mysql internal string formating, (1) UTF-8 or whatever, and (2) timekeeping (timezone and/or region for holidays, etc, IDR the details). These are now documented in the kde techbase akonadi article, because a lot of folks had problems with them. Again, the root issue is that mysql is targeted at professionals, people who run databases for a living, with X-thousand transactions a second or at least in a day. These sorts of folks will EXPECT to be setting this sort of database operating parameter, and these two will likely be just two out of dozens of tweaks that they do to setup and tune their database for good performance in their specific situation. But this is exactly the type of thing you do NOT expect of an end-user. Yet, that's what they're left to do when mysql is used as the backend, and they start having problems because these settings were NOT setup correctly. For this and other similar reasons, had they the chance to do it over again, had they known about all these mysql complications, they'd have likely waited until sqlite got its thread-safe updates that have allowed it to be the new default. It's not as powerful as mysql and isn't really designed for thousands of transactions per second, but it shouldn't have a problem with the few dozens of transactions per day, maybe a few hundred for more active users, that the typical kmail/akonadi user is likely to have. The format it's using is apparently stable, so there's unlikely to be the upgrade issues, and it's not as fancy, so just works without setting the variables that mysql needs set to work without potential issues. But, there's another wrench thrown into the works for akonadi and mysql as well. Unlike most of the rest of kde, where system defaults
