Akonadi agents?
 

Can anyone enlighten me or point me to an explanation of what the
various Akonadi agents do?

Looking at akonadiconsole, I found that I had several duplicate agents
for Personal Contacts and some other resources. I trimmed them down to

- Personal Contacts, using /home/michael/.local/share/contacts/
- Nepomuk Contact Feeder
- Another vcard resource for a single read-only vcard file
- Mail Dispatcher Agent (what's that for)
- std.ics, using /home/michael/.kde/share/apps/korganizer/std.ics
- Birthdays & Anniversaries

Note that I only deleted obvious duplicates and unconfigured agents.

I have no clear idea what agents for "Bookmarks", "Dummy MailTransport
Resource", "Maildir", "Mbox", "POP3", "Notes", "Nepomuk Tags", "Usenet
Newsgroups" are good for. None of these are or were running.

Michael

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Akonadi agents?
 

On Monday, 2010-06-21, Michael Schuerig wrote:
> Can anyone enlighten me or point me to an explanation of what the
> various Akonadi agents do?

Sure.

Agents are helper processes, that do things on behalf of the user
applications.
You can think of them as being similar to system daemons, just on a user
session level.

They are started by Akonadi Control (and restared in case of a crash), just
like Akonadiserver itself.

One special kind of agents is called Akonadi Resources. These are programs
which provide the actual data, a bit lik fetchmail or running rsync as a
cronjob.

> Looking at akonadiconsole, I found that I had several duplicate agents
> for Personal Contacts and some other resources. I trimmed them down to
>
> - Personal Contacts, using /home/michael/.local/share/contacts/

This is a resource that handles contact data stored in a directory, one
contact per file. (also supports distribution lists)

> - Nepomuk Contact Feeder

This is a normal (non-resource) agent (meaning it doesn't provide any data),
which "sees" all contacts passing through Akonadi and extracts information for
searching, which it then puts into the search engine (in this case Nepomuk).

> - Another vcard resource for a single read-only vcard file

Similar to "Personal Contacts" but operating on one file containing multiple
contacts.

Most likely configured to work on the file used by KDE's previous address book
implementation.

> - Mail Dispatcher Agent (what's that for)

An agent that has roughly the job of an MTA (e.g. Exim, Postfix).
It monitors "outbox" folders and sends them with the respective transport
method.

> - std.ics, using /home/michael/.kde/share/apps/korganizer/std.ics

Same as for the vcard resource.

> - Birthdays & Anniversaries

This one creates kind of "virtual" calendar items based on birthday and
anniversary dates it finds in contacts.
You only need that one if you want your contact's special dates to show up in
calendaring applications.

> I have no clear idea what agents for "Bookmarks", "Dummy MailTransport
> Resource", "Maildir", "Mbox", "POP3", "Notes", "Nepomuk Tags", "Usenet
> Newsgroups" are good for. None of these are or were running.

Dummy MailTransport Resource sounds like a development related thingy, i.e.
not something that should be installed in a normal system.
Probably an error in upstream's build system files.

Maildir, MBox and POP3 are resources for mail sources, i.e. local maildir
directories, local mbox files, POP3 servers.
There is also an IMAP resource.

Bookmarks are for bookmark files in XBEL format (such as used by Konqueror or
Epiphany).

Notes is, AFAIK, for "Sticky Notes" files, e.g. KNotes.

Usenet Newsgroups is for NNTP servers.

I am not sure about Nepomuk Tags. I think it creates a folder tree based on
Nepomuk tagged Akonadi items. E.g. if you tag emails in different folders with
the same tag, the Nepomuk Tag Resource will show them together in the same
folder.

Cheers,
Kevin

Akonadi agents?
 

On Monday 21 June 2010, Kevin Krammer wrote:
> On Monday, 2010-06-21, Michael Schuerig wrote:
> > Can anyone enlighten me or point me to an explanation of what the
> > various Akonadi agents do?
>
> Sure.
>
> Agents are helper processes, that do things on behalf of the user
> applications.
> You can think of them as being similar to system daemons, just on a
> user session level.

Kevin,

thanks for the explanation. There's one crucial thing I'm not clear
about yet: Are the resource agents -- supposed to be -- the path of
access to the given resource?

I don't have resources for notes and bookmarks, still KNotes sees its
notes and Konqueror as well as the Bookmark Editor have access to their
bookmarks. I take this to mean that these programs access the data
around the resource agents. The same might be true for contacts and
calendar in Kontact.

> > I have no clear idea what agents for "Bookmarks", "Dummy
> > MailTransport Resource", "Maildir", "Mbox", "POP3", "Notes",
> > "Nepomuk Tags", "Usenet Newsgroups" are good for. None of these
> > are or were running.
>
> Dummy MailTransport Resource sounds like a development related
> thingy, i.e. not something that should be installed in a normal
> system.
> Probably an error in upstream's build system files.

I don't quite understand what the purposes of the mail-related agents
are. Does Nepomuk use them to index mail? Where and how are they
configured "publicly"? I can configure them in akonadiconsole, but
that's a development tool.

Michael

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Akonadi agents?
 

On Monday, 2010-06-21, Michael Schuerig wrote:
> On Monday 21 June 2010, Kevin Krammer wrote:

> thanks for the explanation. There's one crucial thing I'm not clear
> about yet: Are the resource agents -- supposed to be -- the path of
> access to the given resource?

Correct.
They provide data to Akonadi, Akonadi provides the data to all other clients.
Data added by other clients to folders (Akonadi collections) controlled by a
resource are added to that resource. How the resource reacts on that depends
on the resource, e.g.upload, store in file, whatever.

> I don't have resources for notes and bookmarks, still KNotes sees its
> notes and Konqueror as well as the Bookmark Editor have access to their
> bookmarks. I take this to mean that these programs access the data
> around the resource agents. The same might be true for contacts and
> calendar in Kontact.

As of KDE 4.4, the only KDE PIM application using Akonadi as its main data
provider is KAddressBook. So that means contacts in Kontact.
Calendar is still using the old KResource framework, so is KNotes (or whatever
it used to access its data).
Konqueror, or rather KDE's bookmark library, is also directly accessing the
respective files.

> > > I have no clear idea what agents for "Bookmarks", "Dummy
> > > MailTransport Resource", "Maildir", "Mbox", "POP3", "Notes",
> > > "Nepomuk Tags", "Usenet Newsgroups" are good for. None of these
> > > are or were running.
> >
> > Dummy MailTransport Resource sounds like a development related
> > thingy, i.e. not something that should be installed in a normal
> > system.
> > Probably an error in upstream's build system files.
>
> I don't quite understand what the purposes of the mail-related agents
> are. Does Nepomuk use them to index mail? Where and how are they
> configured "publicly"? I can configure them in akonadiconsole, but
> that's a development tool.

The mail related agents are there for providing mail to mail using
applications, e.g. email clients, new email notifiers, etc. [1]
The Nepomuk Email Feeder is indeed using the mails like its Contact sibling
working on contacts.

One maildir resource is usually created by the Maildispatcher agent, so it has
at least one outbox and one sent-mail folder to work on.

The KMail migrator will create resources for all accounts configured in KMail
when it processes the exisiting KMail config on upgrade to KMail2.

EMail programs, such as KMail2 or the Akonadi based experiemental version of
Mailody, have account setup facilities which will also result in resources
being created.

Finally, next version of KDE PIM will reintroduce [2] a
systemsettings/controlcenter module for configuring resources (just like it
has right now for KResource plugins).

Cheers,
Kevin

[1] indirect usage could be accessing contacts or calendar on an IMAP server,
e.g. a Kolab based groupware system
[2] it is installed but "hidden" from the systemsettings application.
kcmshell4 kcm_akonadi can currently be used to access it.

Akonadi agents?
 

On Monday 21 June 2010, Kevin Krammer wrote:
> On Monday, 2010-06-21, Michael Schuerig wrote:
> > On Monday 21 June 2010, Kevin Krammer wrote:
[snip]

Thanks a lot for the elaboration.

Michael

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