Trojita becomes a part of the KDE project

I'm happy to announce that Trojitá, a fast IMAP e-mail client, has become part of the KDE project. You can find it below extragear/pim/trojita .

Why moving under the KDE umbrella?

After reading the KDE's manifesto, it became obvious that the KDE project's values align quite well with what we want to achieve in Trojitá. Becoming part of a bigger community is a logical next step -- it will surely make Trojitá more visible, and the KDE community will get a competing e-mail client for those who might not be happy with the more established offerings. Competition is good, people say.

But I don't want to install KDE!

You don't have to. Trojitá will remain usable without KDE; you won't need it for running Trojitá, nor for compiling the application. We don't use any KDE-specific classes, so we do not link to kdelibs at all. In future, I hope we will be able to offer an optional feature to integrate with KDE more closely, but there are no plans to make Trojitá require the KDE libraries.

How is it going?

Extremely well! Five new people have already contributed code to Trojitá, and the localization team behind KDE got a terrific job with providing translation into eleven languages (and I had endless hours of fun hacking together lconvert -based setup to make sure that Trojitá's Qt-based translations work well with KDE's gettext -based workflow -- oh boy was that fun!). Trojitá also takes part in the Google Code-in project; Mohammed Nafees has already added a feature for multiple sender identities. I also had a great chat with the KDE PIM maintainers about sharing of our code in future.

What's next?

A lot of work is still in front of us -- from boring housekeeping like moving to KDE's Bugzilla for issue tracking to adding exciting (and complicated!) new features like support for multiple accounts. But the important part is that Trojitá is live and progressing swiftly -- features are being added, bugs are getting fixed on a faily basis and other people besides me are actually using the application on a daaily basis. According to Ohloh's statistics, we have a well established, mature codebase maintained by a large development team with increasing year-over-year commits.

Interested?

If you are interested in helping out, check out the instructions and just start hacking!

Cheers,

Jan