Re: kdepim and akonadi

[Vincent Frison <vincent.frison@gmail.com>]

On Sunday 21 August 2011 at 10:54:59, Andreas Cord-Landwehr wrote: 
> On Sunday 21 August 2011 09:36:02 Dietz Pröpper wrote:
> > if I got that right, current (4.7) kdepim uses akonadi as a storage
> > backend for everything.
> 
> Hi, that's the most common misunderstanding about the new KDEPIM structure:
> Akonadi is not the storage backend, it is a unifying cache for several
> storage backends with which applications can interact.
> 
> Afaik the vCalendar file storage backend and Maildir file structure backend
> are both supported by Akonadi resources as shipped with the current
> (current as in shipped with KDE SC 4.7, but not yet provided by Debian)
> KDEPIM releases. This allows easy adding of new resources for various
> backends like, e.g., a Facebook resource. [1], Yahoo calendar [2], Google
> calendar, eGroupware.
> 
> Hence, this does not mean that the "old" storage resources will all vanish.
> For instance, I currently (running a self compiled KDEPIM 4.7) use an IMAP
> mail server, a vCalendar file, an addressbook as vCard directory, an
> eGroupware server for addressbook and calendar (by the Akonadi GroupDAV
> resource), and a Google calendar (by the Akonadi CalDAV resource).
> 
> The indexing and semantic desktop stuff then is a different topic: those
> things are done by the Nepomuk framework, feeding a big Virtuoso datasbase.
> For performance reasons it is possible to switch indexing of mails off
> (well, then tagging and full-text search in mails is also switched off).
> 
> Coming back to your questions: The reason why the currently with Debian
> shipped KMail application relies on Akonadi is afaik the connection to
> KAdressbook, which already switched its storage system to be cached by the
> Akonadi server with its 4.6 release. With the 4.7 release this switch is
> also done for most of the remaining PIM applications (at least with KMail
> and KOrganizer). But as with this switch all storage access functionality
> moved from the KDEPIM applications to Akonadi, using KDEPIM without
> Akonadi is not possible.

Thanks Andreas for your explanation,

So, for users who would like to sync with Google Calendar/Contacts, should they wait until KDE 4.7 
is available for Sid in order to use KDEPIM 4.7 (or maybe 4.6) an then be able to use the 
CalDAV/CardDAV resources ?

But I'm still confused about the utility of dedicated Google Calendar/Contacts resources (based on 
libgcal and googledata) in regards to the more generic CalDAV/CardDAV resources which could do the 
same work (in a user point of view).

Thanks, Vincent.