Looking for a new address book

[jgpallack]

Greetings,

Since KAddressBook 4.4 is completely useless to me, I am looking to replace it with new address book software. Switching back to KDE 4.3 isn't an option--I had to rebuild almost my entire system to switch to 4.4, a process which left my desktop unusable for an entire weekend, and I'm not going through that so soon.

Does anyone have any suggestions for an address book for me to use? My requirements are the following: it must be able to read .vcf address books, it must support at least every single field KAddressBook supported in 4.3, and it must support fully-configurable views (i.e. I should be able to choose the columns that appear in the table and both primary and secondary sort orders). Right now, I am completely without usable contacts software.

Also, I am convinced KDE's development model is fundamentally broken, and I implore the Gentoo team to permanently remove all of KDE from the main portage tree. As long as KDE insists on making official releases with experimental, feature-incomplete software replacing stable, feature-complete software, KDE should be exclusively hosted in the kde-testing and kde-crazy overlays. Just because I'm willing to take risks and install from overlays doesn't mean users of stable systems (of which I am not one) shouldn't be shielded from the KDE team's irresponsible shenanigans.

[audiodef]

I don't know about the address book, but I feel your pain about KDE 4. KDE 3.5 was great and the KDE team completely ignored the solid foundation of 3.5 when starting 4. The Gentoo maintainers aren't going to take it out of Portage, though. I spent quite a few headache days on KDE 4.x myself. I'm happy to say I have two working KDE 4 ~arch systems now, but boy howdy was it a pain to get there! Gnome isn't much better.

Really off topic, but I figured since you mentioned desktop woes in general, check out Fluxbox, Xfce, FVWM, and such (poke around in /usr/portage/x11-wm). Fluxbox is my personal fave. They're all simpler, easier, highly configurable, and give you a lot less BS than the major DE's.

[Jim6]

Does anyone have any suggestions for an address book for me to use? My requirements are the following:
it must be able to read .vcf address books,
it must support at least every single field KAddressBook supported in 4.3,
it must support fully-configurable views (i.e. I should be able to choose the columns that appear in the table and both primary and secondary sort orders).

I'm not sure what your problem is - I have just imported all of my separate .vcf addressbook entries from 4.3 to a single .vcf addressbook for 4.4. All plaintext, no hassle. As .vcf is a pretty extensible format (if non-ideal), I don't see what fields you're missing - all of mine seemed to work. Check the vcard wiki entry - did kaddressbook formerly support non-standard fields?

Once I got used to it, I actually prefer the new look - sorry. A better place for you to register your problems with the design (ideally in a less heated, and more specific manner) would be on the kaddressbook / kontact mailing list or bug tracker.

Also, I am convinced KDE's development model is fundamentally broken, and I implore the Gentoo team to permanently remove all of KDE from the main portage tree. As long as KDE insists on making official releases with experimental, feature-incomplete software replacing stable, feature-complete software, KDE should be exclusively hosted in the kde-testing and kde-crazy overlays. Just because I'm willing to take risks and install from overlays doesn't mean users of stable systems (of which I am not one) shouldn't be shielded from the KDE team's irresponsible shenanigans.

With a pinch of salt, I more or less agree with you - perhaps we should regard KDE 4.4 as KDE4-0.4, rather than as a full release. Still, this is open-source - get over to the mailing list and have your say!

[cjubon]

@jgpallak: A quick search in portage gives me the following:

Code: Select all

sufi@sahib ~ $ qsearch address
dev-perl/Email-Address Email::Address - RFC 2822 Address Parsing and Creation                                                 
dev-ruby/addressable A replacement for the URI implementation that is part of Ruby's standard library.                        
gnustep-apps/addresses Addresses is a Apple Addressbook work alike (standalone and for GNUMail)                               
kde-base/kaddressbook The KDE Address Book                     
sufi@sahib ~ $ qsearch contact                                 
gnome-extra/contacts A small, lightweight addressbook for GNOME
gpe-base/gpe-contacts The GPE Contacts Manager                 
gpe-base/libcontactsdb Database access library for GPE calendar
kde-misc/krunner-kopete-contacts A krunner plug-in that allows you to open conversation with your contact

Maybe the gnustep/apps/addresses is worth a try. Further, mozilla's mail client thunderbird contains a good address book.

With a pinch of salt, I more or less agree with you - perhaps we should regard KDE 4.4 as KDE4-0.4, rather than as a full release. Still, this is open-source - get over to the mailing list and have your say!

Well but jgpallak's concern was about including kde-4 releases in to the "official" Gentoo portage tree, so the main addressees are the Gentoo folks. I also think this issue deserves further discussion, maybe in the "Gentoo Chat" forum.

Edit: Ok, after some hesitation, I upgraded to kde-4.4 during the last hours, and I don't see why the new address book should be useless or just less feature rich than the one from 4.3.5. Everything is the same, just the initial view is different---and much more convenient than the old one. So what?

[MickKi]

I've also been troubled a lot with the kaddressbook from 4.4 onwards. I cannot see any of my contacts in it. Two boxen one with sqlite and one with mysql. All I see is akonadi_vcarddit_resource0 and nothing else. I tried different settings on both machines in case I can see my kabc contacts - but none is shown.

Should I expect anything better with kde-4.5, or is there perhaps some fix I am missing?

[xiber]

app-office/rubrica