Re: [Opensync-users] Where to start?

[Juha T. <Juh...@ik...>]

On Wednesday 19 November 2008 17:34:48 Dotan Cohen wrote:
> I need to sync my KDE-PIM calendar with either my Nokia E71 or my
> Nokia 6288. 

I've E71 too here. And i use KDE.

> Opensync 0.22 is already installed on my Kubuntu 8.04 (KDE 
> 3.5.10) machine. 

Good news: 0.2x versions have kdepim plugin
Bad news: 0.2x does not really work, that's why the big changes started for 0.40.

> I go to opensync.org and try these links: 
> Help / Guide
> Wiki
> Documentation for 0 - 0.2x
> 
> "Help/Guide" is the Trac help system- no good for me. "Wiki" takes me
> back to the homepage. 

Yep, one of the few reasons I'm against this whole web wikialization. 
If you were a bricklayer and left from finished work, your tools would
be partly visible between the bricks you laid. Or if you were an electrician,
your meters would be part of the house electric circuits. Or for book writer,
you would find the instructions from book margins how to change the 
color cartridge for the typewriter. Wiki tries to solve a content problem by
changing the tools and way to access the content. You just have been confused
by the above.

> "Documentation for 0 - 0.2x" has these relevant 
> links:
> DeviceCompatibilityList
> Examples
> FAQ
> 
> "DeviceCompatibilityList" makes me confidant that the E71 is
> supported. All the links on the"Examples" return 404 errors. "FAQ" has
> a question 'How do I get started?' but the answer is literally to
> install then 'start tinkering'.

What we have, is a problem in docs that that was not versioned at all,
which started to be a problem when we had 0.3x development versions that
were not compatible with the docs anymore. Some people started to mix docs
but imo it's better to have releases that will also appear in documentation
space. So, I splitted the docs last weekend to

 http://www.opensync.org/wiki/docs

and unfortunately you cought me in middle of indexing them. Another problem 
is that i found out that we have other kind of stuff that needs versioning too
but is not part of docs, so the whole hierarchy is screwed and I need to re-do it.

Part of my last week meeting's action points were to make some 
kind of guidelines for wiki and it's due tomorrow so this will 
get better today evening.

> So I then turned to Google and searched on the keywords "kde,
> opensync, nokia". I did not get very far. Where to go from here? This
> is not a troll but a real question: Is opensync meant to be used by
> regular joes like me (mechanical engineers, not computer programmers)?

Yes it is. Part of the goals for 0.40 release were to make it way much
easier in many ways and it has already achived quite a few of them. One
is to make configuration easier. We're already working with the installation
docs. Once we get the 0.40 release out, all distros will pick it and you don't
have to worry about the installation, which is somewhat laborious at the
moment.

> If so, where is the documentation?

  http://www.opensync.org/wiki/TitleIndex

is all wiki pages there are. that's autogenerated and like typical wiki, we
have not had anyone really looking the big picture but everyone have scratched
something where finds a suitable place and thus there is a lot of repeating,
empty pages and outdated information as code has moved faster than docs.

Short answer to your questions is: 

current opensync might work as 0.2x what you probably find from your distro.
if it doesn't, you need some hacking skills to install the current svn version
which works better, but still has some annoying bugs. You might want to wait
few weeks it to get better. See the roadmap for open tickets.

> I thank you in advance and apologize for the provocative nature of
> this post, but there is no better way to word it.
 
Well, you're not the first one. This is one of the most annoying missing
feature on opensource desktop. I was one of you, swearing it after wasting
countless hours trying to make it work. 

I cannot code good c-code. But still, I came to irc channel, tried to help 
everywhere I can and belive me, there is more things to do than I've time. 
We welcome you to join to help us (which you already did by giving feedback 
about web/docs).


Tuju

-- 
Varo hattupäisiä autoilijoita.