PIM software (was: Back to the basics: improving user experience)

[Knight Walker]

On Fri, 2008-10-17 at 14:02 +0200, Mark Weinem wrote: 
> Yes, the do indeed use MySQL!

The follow-up question to that is: Does it really _need_ MySQL, or does
it just use the convenience of an SQL back-end?

If it just needs SQL, then it could be altered to use SQLite. If it
requires MySQL, then it may be more work to port to SQLite than to make
something new.

To me, the fact that there are so many PIM projects for Linux means two
things: 1) It's fun to write one, and 2) Everyone has their own
(possibly incompatible) requirements for what a PIM stack should do.

I can see how it would be fun to write one, but with all the existing
ones (EDS, various KDE-based ones, GPE, QTopia, etc.) I don't really
want to. Plus I'm still fighting with building an OpenMoko environment
(Fighting with MokoMakefile on a Fedora 8 box).

But I do agree that there is a strong need for PIM functions on the
phone. I also think it's something we as the community can do while
leaving the Core Developers free to work on their stated projects. I
would like some guidance from the folks at FreeSmartPhone.org (Since FSO
is supposed to define a PIM API) but thus far it doesn't look like
anything has been written about it yet. Ideally what I'd like to see is
a front-end and back-end APIs for the PIM functions, so those who really
like one PIM server or another (See above-mentioned ones) can plug-in
whatever they like (Possibly with a shim that translates it for the FSO
API).

-KW