On Sunday 22 November 2009 10:33:41 Mick wrote: > On Sunday 22 November 2009 03:41:35 sean wrote: > > Dale wrote: > > > I would also add, watch the USE flags. You may be able to turn some > > > off, that may help as well. > > > Dale > > > > Altering some USE flags was a big help. I had been altering them, but > > finally it worked. > > I went from over 300 packages down to 32. > > Would you mind sharing what these flags were. I have been trying to get > rid of akonadi in vane and have run out of flags to take out.
You can't get rid of akonadi, at least not the server. It's a hard dependency of kdepimlibs. Currently, you can switch it off, but you can't avoid having it. As to why you can't get rid of it, it has to do with what the KDE devs envisage for KDE-4, all of this is in public statements and blogs from around the time of the release of KDE-4.0. They want to build a totally integrated desktop, where all apps are aware of all other apps (where appropriate of course) and integrate with each other. So you can do things like have a message be received by kopete which fires off a plasma that does $NEAT_STUFF. Or, every PIM app hooks into the same backend store so you can see your mail history with someone in your address book and display it next to their tweets. These are just examples, the point is that KDE wants to give you a framework where other devs can hook this data up in ways not envisioned yet. You can see this vision by looking closely at the so-called "pillars of KDE-4" - plasma, semantic desktop, akonadi, nepomuk, strigi, et al. It's not all about flashy eye-candy, it's about connecting information in visual way. To do this, your PIM apps need a common backend storage - akonadi. To find stuff that is semantically linked, you need a search engine - nepomuk and strigi. It is simply not feasible to try and build software that can do this and also offer the feature to switch it all off. You could try and write such software, but it will be as buggy as hell. Given this vision for KDE-4, one must realize that the days of KDE-2 are long gone. KDE is no longer a bunch of apps with a common look and feel, so if you don't want the features of KDE-4, then you should not use KDE-4. Lucky for you, this is Linux and OSS, so there are plenty of other window managers and apps out there to chose from. At least one of them must satisfy your wish for an akonadi-less PIM system -- alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com
