Month: January 2009

A generic E-mail metadata D-Bus API

A generic E-mail metadata API

You guys remember the Evolution Metadata API? No? I wrote about it a few days ago.

We now want Tracker to integrate with the KDE desktop too. I started implementing the D-Bus API in KMail. I have adapted the specification to become more generic and to split out specific pieces into a shared and a specific part. Like for example the ontology.

QT/C++

Yes, I’m doing some QT/C++ coding after three years of not having to touch a lot of C++. But I’ll manage. I mean, it can’t get worse than Python, PHP or Perl, right? I survived developing with those languages too and it’s not my first time that I had to touch C++ code. Also, I survive GObject without always having Vala available.

Well, QT/C++ is interesting. Firstly I refuse to call it normal C++, it’s not normal C++ at all. That’s not necessarily a bad thing about it, though. Secondly on top of the inhuman quagmire that C++ has become by itself, QT adds almost as much boilerplate and macros as GObject is doing on top of C

…

That’s not good.

In my opinion C++ is not a nice language at all. It’s a completely inconsistent quagmire in my opinion.

Freedesktop.Org

I’m not immediately proposing it as a Freedesktop.Org standard. My personal experience with F.D.O. is that unless you have a few implementations nothing much will happen with your proposal. At least not for several months. Maybe if I first finish the implementation for KMail while having the one for Evolution ready it’ll speeds things up?

Let’s first implement it for both E-mail clients.

Akonadi

This is a message for specifically Aaron Seigo, because I know he would otherwise be frantic about it.

I have been talking with the KMail developers and because KMail’s Akonadi integration will take too long to be finished we have agreed to start with this D-Bus API. We will most likely integrate Tracker with Akonadi as soon as it starts becoming consumable on people’s KDE desktops.

Birds will sing, the sun will shine. Don’t worry too much and especially don’t start punching the project teams who are actively but pragmatically trying to make things better.

We’ll get there but converting Evolution to use Akonadi is trying to take too large steps and is therefor not a useful proposal at this moment. While for Tracker, Akonadi needs to be ready *now*.

I propose that the Akonadi people develop a CamelProvider that talks with Akonadi, by the way. Then make an EPlugin that overrides the account management to always create such Akonadi accounts and develop working and well tested migration code for the data.

I think even if this is ever started as a project that it would be quite unlikely that this will be finished in time. So not very useful for Tracker right now.

Utilitarianism

Introduction

In a discussion some concluded that technology X is ‘more tied to GNOME’ than technology Y because ‘more [GNOME] people are helped by X’ due to dependencies for Y. Dependencies that might be unacceptable for some people.

This smells like utilitarianism and therefore it’s subject to criticism.

Utilitarianism is probably best described by Jeremy Bentham as:

Ethics at large may be defined, the art of directing men’s actions to the production of the greatest possible quantity of happiness.

— Bentham, Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation

A situational example that, in my opinion, falsifies this:

You are standing near the handle of a railroad switch. Six people are attached to the rails. Five of them at one side of the switch, one at the other side of the switch. Currently the handle is set in such a way that five people will be killed. A train is coming. There’s no time to get help.

  • Is it immoral to use the handle and kill one person but save five others?
  • Is it immoral not to use the handle and let five people get killed?

The utilitarianist chooses the first option, right? He must direct his actions to the production of the greatest possible quantity of happiness.

Body of the discussion

Now imagine that you have to throw a person on the rails to save the lives of five others. The person would instantly get killed but the five others would be saved by you sacrificing one other.

A true utilitarianist would pick the first option in both exercises; he would use the handle and he would throw a person on the rails. In both cases he believes his total value of produced happiness is (+3) and he believes that in both situations picking the second option means his total value of produced happiness is (-4) + (+1) = (-3). The person who picks the second option is therefore considered ethically immoral by a true utilitarianist.

For most people that’s not what they meant the first time. Apparently ethics don’t allow you to always say (+4) + (-1) = (+3) about happiness. I’ll explain.

The essence of the discussion

Psychologically, less people will believe that throwing a person on the rails is morally the right thing to do. When we can impersonificate we make it more easy for our brains to handle such a decision. Ethically and morally the situation is the same. People feel filthy when they need to physically touch a person in a way that’ll get him killed. A handle makes it more easy to kill him.

Let’s get back to the Gnome technology discussion … If you consider pure utilitarianism as most ethical, then you should immediately stop developing for GNOME and start working at Microsoft: writing good Windows software at Microsoft would produce a greater possible quantity of happiness.

Please also consider reading criticism and defence of utilitarianism at wikipedia. Wikipedia is not necessarily a good source, but do click on some links on the page and you’ll find some reliable information.

Some scientists claim that we have a moral instinct, which is apparently programmed by our genes into our brains. I too believe that genetics probably explain why we have a moral system.

The developer of X built his case as following: My technology only promotes happiness. The technology doesn’t promote unhappiness.

It was a good attempt but there are multiple fallacies in his defense.

Firstly, in a similar way doesn’t technology Y promote unhappiness either. If this is assumed about X, neither promote unhappiness.

Secondly, how does the developer of X know that his technology promotes no unhappiness at all? Y also promotes some unhappiness and I don’t have to claim that it doesn’t. That’s a silly assumption.

Thirdly, let’s learn by example: downplaying the amount of unhappiness happens to be the exact same thing regimes having control over their media also did whenever they executed military action. The act of downplaying the amount of unhappiness should create a reason for the spectator to question it.

Finally, my opinion is that the very act of claiming that ‘X is more tied to GNOME’, will create unhappiness among the supporters of Y. Making the railroad example applicable anyway.

My conclusion and the reason for writing this

‘More’ and ‘less’ happiness doesn’t mean a lot if both are incommensurable. Valuations like “more tied to GNOME” and “less tied to GNOME” aren’t meaningful to me. That’s because I’m not a utilitarianist. I even believe that pure utilitarianism is dangerous for our species.

To conclude I think we should prevent that the GNOME philosophy is damaged by too much utilitarianism.

The Evolution DBus metadata API

I just finished the Evolution DBus metadata API‘s implementation. Information about this work can be found on this wiki page.

It’s currently not shipped as part of Evolution. Instead it’s done as an EPlugin compiled and installed by Tracker if your Evolution’s development package is 2.25.5 or later. At this moment that’s the versions in Evolution‘s and Evolution Data Server‘s Subversion trunks.

This API enables application developers to get notified not just about new E-mails, but also about any state changes of any E-mail Evolution handles. For example whenever the state of an E-mail changes from Unseen to Seen. You are invited to check out this Vala example to learn how to use the DBus API yourself.

Not only does the API give you “I’ll call you” or “pushed” hints about these state changes, it also gives you a lot of meta information about each E-mail: subject, sent, from, to, cached MIME filename, cc, service’s uid, seen, junk status, answered status, flagged status, forwarded status, deleted status, size, tags, keywords and flags.

The API will also inform you about message arrivals and about message expunges. Which are not the same as flagged for deletion.

With this information you have enough to build a simple E-mail client outside of Evolution that uses just this API to get itself informed about Evolution’s E-mails. That’s of course not the purpose of it, but it illustrates the completeness.

The purpose is to let a metadata engine like Tracker and Beagle get themselves fully informed and aware of all the state and metadata of your E-mails in real time. No more scanning of your $HOME/.evolution/mail directory. Which is by the way a for Evolution internal cache format that will change and has changed in the past. Scanning it yourself is for that reason too unreliable to depend on. This EPlugin uses Evolution’s own APIs, and runs in Evolution’s processes, to get the same information out and then pass it to one of Tracker’s processes over IPC.

“IPC??”, I hear you thinking, “isn’t that slow??”. Well we measured it. If a quite slow IPC like DBus can throw all of the metadata of 10,000 E-mails over in less time than Evolution needs to start up, knowing that we throw it over asynchronously with the user interface’s thread of Evolution, they I don’t think you should be too worried about that. But just in case you would still be worried have I specified the protocol in such a way that only the delta of changes since the last time Tracker registered itself are sent. While Evolution and Tracker run, Evolution will communicate new info with Tracker: Evolution pushes stuff into Tracker instead of Tracker pulling things out of Evolution.

What are you waiting for? Start adapting your $HOME/.evolution/mail scanning softwares! Now!