Re: New to list.Would like to help with kpilot

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Hello Alexandre,

Welcome here! Great to hear that another person wants to help the KPilot 
development! Currently, Adriaan de Groot is the maintainer and main developer 
with help from David Bishop. I've currently fixed the vcal conduit (actually 
it's the iCalendar conduit, syncing the todo list and the calendar to a .ics 
file for KOrganizer), and right now I'm rewriting the addressbook conduit to 
use the new KABC library. A few days ago, Adriaan mentioned that he started 
(or at least planned to start) fixing the notes conduit.

Am Freitag, 31. Mai 2002 06:29 schrieb Alexandre Sagala:
> Hi all,
>       I am new to this list. I just bought a Palm m130 and took a look at
> KPilot. I was a bit disapointed. I want to help make it better. I noticed

What exactly did you expect? Could you please specify a little more what you 
didn't like about it, what you found confusing, etc.  so we can think about 
what can be improved in which way.

BTW, which version of kpilot are you using? The one that came with kde 2.2.2, 
3.0 or 3.0.1, or did you compile your own kpilot from the latest cvs sources? 
KPilot was changed a lot in either of these releases.

> there wasnt alot of documentation on the kpilot website. Could someone
> point me to a list or todo on what has to been done. 

In the kpilot cvs (in the kde cvs tree in kdepim/kpilot, you can also take a 
look at it via the webcvs: 
http://webcvs.kde.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/kdepim/kpilot/) there is a file 
called TODO. I'm not sure it is complete, but at least it shows a few task 
which need some work.

> I would like to work on the gui or conduits. 

I think all conduits except the expense and the mail conduit are being worked 
on. The mail conduit could use a good deal of work to use KDE's 
pop(s)/imap(s) ioslave. I don't know how much experience you have with kde 
programming, so it's hard to suggest anything you can work on.

Adriaan once said he always keeps a list of useful things new developers can 
do to learn the KPilot code. You might also start with one of these, or bring 
your own ideas.

Another idea would be to work together with the usability mailinglist 
(kde-usability@xxxxxxx) to make kpilot more intuitive and consistent. E.g. 
currently we're lacking a uniform layout for the conduit configuration 
dialogs, which every conduit implements itself in whatever way the individual 
developer liked best. A few options are even evailable in KPilot's config 
dialog, and in a conduit's setup dialog (e.g. prefer fast sync to full sync 
is in KPIlot's config and in the vcalconduit config).
I also think that the conduit configuration (which is the most important part 
of KPilot except for the sync itself) is hidden too much.

What I personally would like to see is a base library for database conduits, 
which provides all the sync structure and backends for databases. Then the 
individual conduits (e.g. expenses, ThinkDB2, DB, PunchClock, 
BloodPressureMgs, ...) would only have to implement code to unpack the 
individual records, the rest is done by the base class. Currently the 
vcalconduits (calendar and todo) use this kind of system.
But that's not of high priority at the moment, and it's also a lot of work and 
needs carful planning.

> Any help would be greatly appreciated. 

Well, you found the right place to ask for help or suggestions. 

> I do not want to work on something already being worked on.

I mentioned everything I know that is being worked on. Adriaan might know 
somebody else working on another part of Kpilot...

There are lots of issues you can work on, and I just mentioned a few of them. 
Choose anything you don't like (or anything you would like to have) about 
Kpilot, and start working on it. If any questions come up, don't hesitate to 
ask here, that's how I started in March, too.

Reinhold

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