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

[J. Roeleveld]

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...)

>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?

>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'.

>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).

I hope that can be fixed somehow.

>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.

>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?

>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'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?

Great....

>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....

--
Joost


-- 
Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.