14th February 2003 by Derek Kite

This Week...

Many improvements in the development tools this week. In Kdevelop, work continues on code completion and new code templates. Quanta gets ktips and finishing polishes. Kate, Cervisia, KBabel and Umbrello continue to get better. Support for new XFree86 features are being implemented. And nothing like a gathering of developers to improve the games!
In last week's digest, I quoted Zack Rusin regarding the imap support in kmail. He said
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.
Obselete may have been the wrong choice of words. Marc Mutz responded:
The kroupware branch will be released in hopefully a few days as the result of the Kroupware Project's job for the German BSI.

As such, it will be a stable release, with some features added w.r.t. the 3.1.x branch releases that some people may find useful, even if they're not using the Kolab server. Disconnected IMAP is e.g. one of those things.

So it will be a nice opportunity for people to get stable new features for their favorite mailer without the need to run unstable CVS HEAD or wait until 3.2 is out, albeit w/o translation (apart from German).

And a nice opportunity to report bugs ;-)
Marc Mutz continued:
KMail 1.5 (KDE 3.1) already has IMAP support for quite some time (at least since KDE 2.2). What's new in kroupware_branch (and thus, CVS HEAD) is renaming of IMAP folders and the so-called "disconnected IMAP" mode, in which you sync the server and the client, then disconnect from the server and work on the client's local copy, delete, move and read messages, until the next sync with the server. That alone might make the difference in deploying or not deploying KMail in a given corporate environment.
So for some users, the Kroupware branch, available at www.kroupware.org may be an option. As mentioned, the software isn't translated to other languages, so that limits it's audience somewhat.
Zach clarified his statement:
The question Derek asked me was about imap support - HEAD is the only branch which contains improvements from both kroupware_branch, make_it_cool branch and a whole set of its own fixes. It's the only branch new imap related improvements will be constantly made and that implies other brnaches are obsolete (again, not with the respect to their "use" but as development environments)"

The bottom line is that if I'd recommend either of these branches to readers of the cvs digest I'd be putting them in an uncomfortable situation from a very simple reason - lets say one of the users gets one of those branches to test them out, finds an imap related problem and reports it to the list, our reponse would almost in 100% of the cases be either "fixed in head, please use head" or "sorry, please test it with head and send us that report again".
Hopefully this information will assist those who depend upon this feature. Kde-3.2-features.html lists the features and improvements that will be included in version 3.2

Draft versions of the Digest and the tools that compile most of the content can be found in the Kde cvs repository, in kde-www/areas/cvs-digest.

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