First of all, I was pretty shocked reading about the disappearing of Aaron and all the fuss around. One of the things I really liked, and still like about the KDE community was the nice atmosphere in the community. I still know how Adriaan encouraged me to write some code for some functionality I wanted into KPilot. And also Jason has been quite an inspirator the last years. They are just some of the guys that help the new comers to step over the doorstep and to join “the club”. This is actually exactly what kept me from contributing to my distro of choice. (Yes I switched back again).
Now the question arose, what we need, user or contributors. (1, 2). I think that we need both of them. Even users that do not contribute directly to the project have some use. If only that they show to their family, friends, colleagues etc. that it is possible to have cool, featurefull and most importand free software. A more important question in my opinion is: how does the contributing part of the project respond to people that drop by. Even more urgent stated, how do you and I react on people dropping by and spitting out there thoughts, wishes and complaints? I guess we should more often count to ten before giving an answer. Oh and of course we should not keep quite when one of the contributors is attacked personally, especially not when that happens publically. I hope that the dot revamp will make it a bit easier to moderate this sort of poisonous attacks, but it still leaves us with a lot of other places like b.k.o and mailling lists.
So far my thoughts on this. (Oh and Aaron, I’d love to see you blog online again =:)
Of course I’ve not only been reading blogs the past couple of weeks. I still was finishing my internship. I created an implementation of compressed XML indexes (only the creational part unfortunately, the searching part is left for the master thesis I think). As the code is not very usefull yet I don’t publish it right now. The report is not finished yet, but I’ll put online somewhere when it is. The cool thing about this is that you can get compression ratios between 20%-60% (of the original file size) while have structures that support both navigational and content search queries. Which in turn is nice when you want to have search in XML on small devices for example.
Besides that I worked on my summer of code project. And currently I finished the first part of it namely category syncing. The framework I created previous year is now able to sync the categories of pc records and handheld records. This is quite cool, because it’s implemented in such a way that conduits don’t have to add additional code for this. Next step: port some of the conduits to the akonadi framework. I’m not sure yet how to start on this one, if you have some hints, please let me know. The basic idea is this: The base conduit initializes a dataproxy object for the handheld and one for the pc data store. Both are implemented by specific conduits (let’s say addressbook). The data store is responsible for iterating over the records. In a hotsync this should be only the modified records (is there even some way in akonadi to see if a record is changed after a sync or do I have to keep track of that somehow), and in a fullsync it iterates over all records.
But first I’ll be off for a wedding, a weekend in Prague (I promissed my wife to kiss her on the Karls bridge) and a midweek to some small town 100km above Prague (forgot the name of it).