I joined KDE development in 2006, and joined the KDE PIM team soon after that, where my claim to fame has been EntityTreeModel and other related Qt models and proxies.

My development efforts have always been on the next generation, Akonadi based, Nepomuk using, full blown database depending, modular, portable beauty that will soon be known as KDE PIM 4.6.

After such a long time spent developing the new application suite, it will be great to finally pass the starting line of “Kontact 2”. This is of course just a new beginning for KDE PIM, a milestone in the application development lifecycle and a renewed focus on software that users actually have their hands on. For a long time it has made sense to fix bugs in KDE PIM 4.4 because that is what users had installed. With this release, the development effort turns fully to the future platform.

KDE PIM 4.6 is due to be released on June 7th alongside the 4.6.4 versions of the rest of the KDE application suite.

In terms of features, we think it is user ready and there have been many positive reports already from users of development versions. It is definitely not bug-free however. There are still some problematic communications with Exchange servers, and some resource usage spikes, but we are confident that this is overall a step forward. Users will be able to (mostly) downgrade to KDE PIM 4.4 if the 4.6 version does not meet expectations, but that is not a long-term solution so good bug reports will be required for a smoother experience going forward.

Making software releases is an interesting process requiring coordination of translation teams to ensure that the correct branch is used to generate translation files and produce translated software, promo teams to create a story of the release an understandable message and expectations, packaging teams working on getting the software into repositories for end users and ensuring on-going quality of existing installations, and even coordination of developers to get the remaining bugs resolved.

The packaging world is something I’ve been getting into lately so I can begin to understand what is involved with packages and distros more broadly. Technically KDE PIM is not going to be part of any 4.6 release of the KDE Application Suite, but released alongside it on the same day. We avoid disrupting the ecosystem and momentum of minor KDE releases with a major application release and ensure the ongoing quality of stable updates. Being able to rely on stability of point releases is an advantage to justifying making such releases available in -updates repos. KDE PIM should once again be part of the regular 4.7 release cycle though.

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