KDE4 and search

Aseigo has written some thoughts about search machine integration in the upcomming kde4 and I really appreciate that someone finally came up and talked about the situation of the search machine future in KDE 4: it is very unclear at the moment, and I am very worried to be honest.

The reason is that kat, the search machine of kde and the base for the future tenor framework does not show any development at all at the moment. There is just nothing happening.
Sure, that can be because of the fact that the developers are sitting together and just talk to each other about the development – but we cannot be clear about that, and KDE should not bet on it.
There is actual no noticable movement in this area, and that worries me a lots since one of the things I’m really curious about the fully context sensitive information management which was promissed for KDE 4.
One thing I have to admit though: there was one or the other post from Scott Wheeler about a tagging application but it looked like that was just a test which will be integrated in Juk and so will be far away from what should be a base component for KDE 4. Besides, unfortunately he will not be at akademy which will be very important this year, I think…

So war about the worries, now about the future:
aseigo mentioned that Mandriva ahs hired some people to work on KDE 4 and to work especially on the integration of Nepomuk:

NEPOMUK brings together researchers, industrial software developers, and representative industrial users, to develop a comprehensive solution for extending the personal desktop into a collaboration environment which supports both the personal information management and the sharing and exchange across social and organizational relations.

I love such texts because they can mean everything. But when you try to summarize a big project with lots of participants I guess you have no other choice.

But since this project hasn’t released anything to the public yet – or at least anything I have seen and which gives you a feel of what it really is – we just have to wait and hope – again.
I’m not realyl comfortable with this situation because it gives me the feeling that some parts of the KDE 4 desktop, and in this case a very important part for me, can turn out boring, buggy or even worse not existing.

This is different with Plasma or Phonon were you at least see very dedicated people who are doing a lot of stuff. And although we do not see to much code here once in a while we get messages about the current state, and these messages are always refreshing because they show that there happened a lot during the quiet time.

So, I am worried, but I do not give up hope: KDE has the technical working group now for example which should have an overview if there there are important parts missing for KDE 4 – and which then should step forward and clear the situation. Hopefully it will work out 🙂