Re: [gentoo-user] The mess that's called KDEPIM 4.7 ...

[Alex Schuster]

Mick writes:

> ... or what the unbelievable lack of maturity of KDEPIM devs has landed us in:
>
> I have upgraded KDE on my old laptop to see what gives.  Surprisingly, it was
> not *too* bad; i.e. my old emails were not corrupted, deleted or otherwise
> affected.

I am doing the same on my sister's PC. It doesn't work too well.

> However, the following are things that didn't really work as a rational human
> being would expect with a PIM setup, let alone anyone who's running this in a
> production environment with loads of users!
>
> The auto-migration did not work.  It only worked partially for some mail
> account settings, but did not leave behind a workable system, with half the
> account settings missing.

I had a problem with mysql stuff missing, so Akonadi did not start and
the migration failed. I had to add the mysql USE flag to x11-libs/qt-sql.

> The kmail-migrator --interactive also did not work.

It refuses to start again with an already existing kmailrc.

> I had to change the location pointing to the local mail folders - I keep mine
> under ~/Mail.  Then after pressing F5 on each folder akonadi scanned the
> respective mail directory and my stored messages showed up!  :-)

You're lucky. I created a 'KMail Maildir' resource for the mail folder
that was used with KMail1 in KDE 3.5, and while the folder structure is
imported, I see no mails. Akonadi says it is syncing the folder I
clicked at, but it never finishes. When I drop a mail into a folder
(this workaround had been suggested to my on the KDE mailing list when I
did my own migration (and it worked)), I only see this mail, others
still do not show up.

Then I created a 'Maildir' resource. Some folders sync, but nothing
happens when I select the inbox. I restarted Akonadi, now there are some
13,000 thousand mails in the inbox, and I can view them. The other
folders get populated after pressing F5, but it takes long until they
are actually shown. And switching the folders takes some seconds.

So I started moving folders from the 'Maildir' resource to the default
'Local Folders' Resource. Rather than simply changing the 'Local
Folders' resource path to the Works, but the inbox has some 40,000
mails, and after over one hour only 4000 were copied to their
destination, so I logged out.
The next login, mysqld again eats 150 percent of the three CPU  cores,
and two akonadi_agent processes take another 100, the migration is still
happening. At a rate of < 100 Mails per minute. So it will probably take
 more than 7 hours until it's complete. I do not even know how to abort
this. I deleted the 'Maildir' resource, and the 'Local Folders'
resource, logged out an in again, and had to kill the mysqld process.
The 'Local Folders' resource is being recreated automatically by KMail2
I guess, finally I pointed its directory to the original Mail directory,
and things start to work. At least KDEPIM stuff, the rest of KDE still
has its problems.

> The migration of the email account Settings was even less successful.  The
> settings for Sending transferred across, but the account settings for
> Receiving did not survive.  Well, let me be more precise here.  They did
> survive, as they were all still in the kmailrc file.  I checked this against a
> back up.  No matter, they didn't show up under accounts.

Nothing of this has been auto-migrated here.

> The IMAP4 accounts were less of a success however.  I recreated them from
> scratch, but no messages showed up under Inbox.  Sent and Trash work fine.

At least this is working.

> Having ran out of time I was wondering if you came across such breakages and
> if so how did you fix them.

Personally, I have switched to Claws. It has its own issues, but that's
nothing compared to KMail2. But my sister is used to KMail, and so I try
to make it work for her.

> For now I have masked KDEPIM 4.7 on all of my remaining boxen.  This is too
> messy to have to fix more than once, if I can fix it at all that is!
>
> The only thing that's keeping me from mutt is the zillion shortcut commands
> that I need to learn ... old dog/new tricks and all that.

Claws is okay, except that it does not work with maildirs, the is some
import script or something to convert this to mbox format.
Thunderbird also is a decent mail program.

	Wonko