Information for packagers of KDEPIM ===================================== This document gives some hints to packagers on what is needed to provide a sane installation and packaging for KDEPIM. Akonadi is a key component of KDEPIM that is used by almost all applications. It depends on several components to be properly installed and configured, which are listed below. Also, this document discusses other topics which are of importance for packagers, such as the GPG support. Baloo ------------------ Akonadi uses Baloo for all kind of searches. MySQL ----- Akonadi needs a relational database to keep metadata about the PIM data it manages. There exists different backends for MySQL, PostgreSQL and SQLite. While it might be tempting to use the SQLite backend to reduce dependencies, we highly discourage to use it, because it is not yet finished, can lose your data, has performance problems and is not automatically tested yet! The PostgreSQL backend has some more testing, however we discourage the use of it as well, because it will make the migration path much harder once we'll switch to Virtuoso as SQL backend in the future. So please make MySQL a hard (runtime) dependency for Akonadi and compile the Qt library with support for MySQL (can be done as plugin as well). Akonadi ------- Having a working installation of Baloo and MySQL should normally result in a working installation of Akonadi. Akonadi provides a self test dialog to make sure it really works. Please make sure all tests in this self test dialog pass. The test can be found in a control center module that is started with 'kcmshell4 kcm_akonadi'. The test is in the tab 'Akonadi Server Configuration' and is started with the 'Test...' button. KDEPIM-Runtime -------------- (most of) The kdepim applications can use one or several Akonadi Resources in order to fetch and store PIM data. It is usually a good idea to install the kdepim-runtime package when installing one of the KDEPIM applications. As the module name indicates, it is only needed at runtime. The kdepim-runtime module contains applications and plugins, for example Akonadi resources or KIO slaves, that are needed by all applications making use of the PIM API in kdepimlibs. Third-party applications which use the PIM API can be installed without installing the rest of KDEPIM, only KDEPIM-Runtime (and of course kdepimlibs) is needed. If you don't install KDEPIM-Runtime for third-party applications which use the PIM API of kdepimlibs, these applications will fail to work at runtime. Note that not all parts of kdepimlibs require KDEPIM-Runtime at runtime, only the parts that access the Akonadi store in some way, like 'kcalcore', 'kabc' or 'akonadi'. Other parts, like 'kmime' or 'gpgme++' are not accessing the Akonadi store and therefore don't need KDEPIM-Runtime. Kontact Plugins --------------- Kontact is a container application which embeds other PIM applications such as KMail and KOrganizer. For an application to be embedded in Kontact, it needs to provide a Kontact plugin. These Kontact plugins reside under kontact/plugins, while the applications itself are in the top-level folder. This is important when splitting up the KDEPIM module in several packages. The Kontact plugin should be packaged together with its application. It is an error to install a Kontact plugin without installing the associated application, this will make Kontact crash. As an example, assume you want to provide a separate package for KNode. This package should contain KNode from the knode/ directory, and the Kontact plugin from the kontact/plugins/knode directory. kontact/plugins/knode should not be installed when knode/ is not installed. GPG Support ----------- Crypto operations are supported in multiple places in KDEPIM: KMail provides support for dealing with signed and encrypted mails, and Kleopatra is an application that manages certificates and GPG keys. For this to work, GPG needs to be installed and configured correctly. An easy way to check if you have a working GPG installation is to run the self test in Kleopatra, which checks many aspects of the GPG installation. After starting Kleopatra, the self test can be found in the menu under 'Settings->Perform Self Test'. Please make sure the self test passes. Another way to test is sending an encrypted and signed message with KMail, and later decrypting the received message. Note that saving as draft is not enough here, you need to actually send the mail. A common packaging error is that gpg-agent is not running or that it is wrongly configured. This will result in KMail failing on crypto operations with error messages that give no indication of the real problem, such as 'bad passphrase'. Libraries inside KDEPIM ----------------------- There are several libraries in the KDEPIM module, such as 'libkdepim', 'libkleo' or 'libksieve'. There is no guarantee for a stable API or ABI in those libraries. API and ABI stability is only guaranteed for kdepimlibs. The libraries of the KDEPIM module are generally work in progress and therefore change a lot, API and ABI breakage can occur at any moment. Therefore, please make sure to always ship the libraries with the exact same revision numbers as the applications. This is always the case for the tags created for KDE SC versions. As an example, shipping libkdepim from KDE SC 4.4.1 together with KMail from KDE SC 4.4.2 is an error, and can result in failure at runtime, since this libkdepim is not binary compatible with that KMail. Further resources ---------------- Some frequently occurring problems with Akonadi are collected under http://userbase.kde.org/Akonadi#Some_Technical_Issues. For further questions feel free to contact the KDE PIM developers on kde-pim@kde.org or ask on freenode IRC channel #kontact or #akonadi