Re: [gentoo-user] At last! A Qt5 version of KMail-2 - but here be dragons!

[Peter Humphrey]

On Tuesday, 27 December 2016 15:19:29 GMT J. Roeleveld wrote:
> On December 27, 2016 3:38:28 PM GMT+01:00, Peter Humphrey
<peter@××××××××××××.uk> wrote:
> >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.
>
> Thanks :)
>
> >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.
>
> I would expect font settings. In kmail:4 there is a display part in the
> settings menu. I never did anything directly with Qt to chamge anything.
> I have too many folders anyway for it to fit (unless I would have a BIG
> 4K screen...)

You see how spaced out the folder list is? There's no setting for that in 
KMail as far as I can see. The Qt Configuration tool has an Interface tab. 
Under Global Strut you can set minimum width and height. The default is 
zero, giving Qt free rein to do what it likes, but I could set those to 1 
and kmail:4 would tuck all those folder entries up so that they fitted 
without scrolling. It has no effect on kmail:5 though.

> >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.
>
> That actually looks nice to me. Do the minus (-) blocks actually allow the
> quotes to be folded up?

To each his own of course, but for myself, I just want the text with some 
quoting. Yes the minus blocks do fold up, but all of them or none. There's 
no individual control.

I found a new header selection. After switching it back from 5.2 style to 
Fancy, it's back the way I like it.

> >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.
>
> Hmm... that's not nice. Then again, I only use spell check for documents.
> Not emails. Never really trusted those ever since I saw dictionaries get
> automatically ruined by 'do you want to add this word to the dictionary'.

Kmail:4 used to default to Australian English, no matter how many times I 
reminded it I'm in the UK. This one has no back-end at all.

--->8

> >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.
>
> Always possible. I tend to just install the meta stuff and be done with
> it.

I've found a lot more KDE-5 meta-packages and installed those, but they 
haven't helped with this.

> >Oh, and when I start a reboot in KDE, akonadi crashes with a
> >segmentation fault.
>
> That is a bug. Hope it gets ironed out soon. Maybe still busy indexing
> your emails?

Could be. I'll try leaving it for an hour or two.

Since I wrote, I've noticed that the messages I imported from kmail archive 
are not all in the right folders - about 2000 have magically jumped from the 
Purchases folder to the inbox. I'm also seeing a reversion to that old 
problem of silly numbers of duplicates appearing in random places at random 
times. I had hoped that would be among the first things to be ironed out in 
the :5 version.

> >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.
>
> I'll try to get my desktop converted this week. And will join in the
> bugreporting party.

It would be good to have someone to compare notes with.

--->8

> >I think I'll have to go down the pub to drown my sorrows.
>
> Just don't climb behind the wheel of a car afterwards....

No, it's just a wee stroll. Takes longer to get my shoes on.   :-)

-- 
Regards
Peter