On Sunday, 18 December 2016 19:07:23 GMT J. Roeleveld wrote:

> More important, how is the latest kmail behaving?

My first impression is one of horror. It's ghastly!

I've never seen such profligate waste of screen space. I've attached a 
couple of screen shots to show you what I mean.

Take the folder list, for example. I used to be able to show all those 
folders in one panel with no scroll-bars, with no difficulty reading them; 
now eight folders spill over. I may be able to find a more compact 
arrangement but this is the best I've managed so far. At least with kmail:4 
I could tweak Qt settings to condense it; now nothing I do makes any 
improvement.

Then the message view. Message.png shows what your message looks like in 
this version of KMail (the message I'm replying to now). This is with all 
the bells and whistles I can find switched off.

Next, after I'd emerged kde-apps/kmai-16.12.0, it was incomplete. I had to 
install several other packages to complete it, including the import wizard. 
Rather than messing about, I just emerged kdepim-meta and had done with it.

Even after doing that, I get "No backend available for spell checking," even 
though I've set everything up that I can see. Myspell and hunspell are both 
installed.

In the message list I have next-to-no control over the font. I can set the 
basic one, but not those for unread, important or action items. They're now 
displayed in a reduced-density form of the basic font (while pretending 
they're going to use the same font as the message itself). The designers 
evidently know what I want better than I do (anyone might think this was 
Gnome).

Nothing to do with KMail, but the display of gkrellm has changed 
dramatically. I use its Invisible theme, which hasn't actually been 
invisible since the switch from KDE-3 to 4, but it had a plain, unobtrusive 
grey scheme and showed what I wanted to see, clearly and with no drama. Now, 
the chart backgrounds have changed from charcoal-grey to a dark red, and 
what was grey is now a dreadful salmon-pink. Of course I can't see the red 
traces any longer. Perhaps I'm missing a KDE or Qt component.

Oh, and when I start a reboot in KDE, akonadi crashes with a segmentation 
fault.

I dare say version 16.12.0 of KMail-2 will make a decent platform for 
development, now that it's finally here, but a very great deal of work lies 
ahead. I can see that I'll be doing my fair share of shouting too, at it and 
at the devs.

It's taken me about 30 hours to get this far. I ditched the old system 
altogether and built a new one on the kde-plasma profile. I didn't ask for 
anything in a slot 4, just slot 5 versions. I also ditched my old user and 
set up a new one from scratch. Headache? What headache?

I think I'll have to go down the pub to drown my sorrows.

-- 
Regards
Peter