Re: [gentoo-user] General weirdness - a tale of woe.

[Peter Humphrey <peter@prh.myzen.co.uk>]

On Friday 29 May 2015 16:54:33 Mick wrote:
> On Friday 29 May 2015 16:28:57 Alan Grimes wrote:
> > What in god's name is that stupid database for anyway? Does it perform
> > any useful function? Is there any tool that gives the user any
> > measurable benefit that even justifies one one hundredth of the CPU and
> > disk bandwidth consumed by this missfeature?
> 
> I think you're preaching to the converted here.

He is, no doubt about it.

> I don't think you'll find many advocates in this M/L who support the KDE4
> desktop design decision as a sound architectural choice for your average
> Linux user.

He was talking about tying the e-mail client to a database, not about the KDE4 
desktop, and I've protested at the same thing more than once, sometimes in 
vigorous terms. Made no difference of course, but then I'm just an insufficiently 
humble user.

> I think they were trying to market a desktop for the enterprise and were
> following Gnome's approach of semantic content searches.

It seems to me that, KMail being such a capable e-mail client, there ought to 
be more than one way of installing it. One of those would be as you say: the 
way it's going, aimed at corporations with PIM functions and sharing of all 
manner of things among colleagues. At the other end of the spectrum would be 
what I think all of us on this list would prefer (those who like KDE, that 
is), namely a textual manipulator of simple e-mail files.

The choice could be exercised using something like our USE flags, or it could 
have dual implementations derived more-or-less automatically from a common 
code base.

(In the mid-80s I was working in a project to replace the grid-control 
computer system in England and Wales. The spec had come from our hardware 
people (yes, I know) and required us to develop code that would run equally 
well on Ferranti and GEC machines. The Ferranti scheduling and context-
switching methods heavily favoured small numbers of large processes, whereas 
the GEC imposed a hardware limit of 8K bytes on any running process. We were 
well on the way to making it work, too. What I suggest for KMail pales into 
insignificance compared with that mess. It's just a Simple Matter Of 
Programming, isn't it?)

> Other than the odd bug here and there I was perfectly happy with KDE3 and
> Kmail1 (still using with kde-base/kdepim-meta-4.4.11.1-r1).

I wonder if there's a way to go back to KMail-1 and import all my e-mails from 
KMail-2 archive files into it. Would you like to help me, Mick, with ebuilds 
etc?

-- 
Rgds
Peter