Osnabrueck 5 Report by David Jarvie

It was good to meet the other developers so as to put faces to the names which I'd previously only encountered on the mailing lists. I now feel more part of the team - about time, since I've been involved in KDE PIM for over 5 years. Getting a better perspective on the issues affecting KDE PIM as a whole (particularly Akonadi) was also very useful.

It was extremely useful technically. The biggest benefit was the session on the Qt 4 model-view framework which gave me enough understanding to go ahead and start converting KAlarm to use it. My initial partial implementation actually displayed some data! And it should enable some additional features to be coded very easily compared to the Qt 3 way of doing things. I've seen the light, halleluiah. :-)

Being able to easily ask questions of other people also contributed to finally getting D-Bus to work in KAlarm.

It also emerged in the meeting that in relation to KDE 4 conversion, KAlarm is in a similar state to most of the other KDE PIM applications. Namely that there is a lot to be done, but it isn't necessary to wait for Akonadi before doing it. It makes me feel a lot more positive about getting on with the conversion, which makes that small part of KDE that much more likely to be ready for the KDE 4 release.