7th February 2003 by Derek Kite

This Week...

Work continues on the Kde Personal Information Manager and Koffice. Filters to interoperate with other applications and formats such as Outlook Express, OOImpress, MSWrite, rtf and ApplixGraphics were improved. Plus the continuing improvements to Konqueror, Kopete and many others.
An error slipped in the last two weeks. The krdc improvements were not attributed properly. Arend van Beelen jr. was the author of the patches in question.
Users of Kmail are waiting patiently for the imap support to be completed. I asked Zack Rusin:
Could you give an idea how imap support is going in head?

For someone who needs the functionality, is one or other of the branches working well enough? make_it_cool or kroupware?
Zack responded:
Well, make_it_cool is basically gone and at this point there's very little reason for using it. Don told me that he'll be merging it as soon as I get folderjobs in. kroupware is also obsolete. All development is now in HEAD.

Just yesterday I integrated folderjobs, which make all jobs on folders asynchronous. That merge alone should fix a lot of imap related problems. Basically now that folderjobs are in, you can and will expect a lot of imap related improvements all over KMail. Carsten has been doing an awesome job, fixing a lot of imap related problems and with folderjobs it looks like, finally, we will have a stable and complete imap support in KMail.
I received a note from Sarang Lakare, who said:
I just wanted to point out that kmag was added to KDE last week but there was no mention in last weeks digest nor is it there in this weeks digest.

...

Could you please add it to the digest so that people know that kmag is part of KDE now?
Being lazy and impertinent, I asked what kmag was. Sarang responded:
kmag is screen magnifier for KDE. http://kmag.sourceforge.net

It is part of the kde-accessibility module. It is useful for those with vision disability and those working with images and graphics (like icon drawing etc.)
KFS is described as a simple tool for 'synchronising' files between two sites. Usually, these two sites will be a local directory on your machine and a remote directory via FTP. This project was added to the kde repository. Many thanks to the developers for those updates.
On another subject, think what you may of ESR, this quote seems to capture the essence of this community. From The Art of Unix Programming:
The fun factor started a virtuous circle early in Unix's history. People liked Unix, so they built more programs for it that made it nicer to use. Today people build entire, production-quality open-source Unix systems as a hobby. To understand how remarkable this is, ask yourself when you last heard of anybody cloning OS/360 or VAX VMS or Microsoft Windows for fun.

No commits found