The Kastle conference in Nove Hrady, Czech Republic, which finishes on Sunday has produced what everybody expected; mounds of code. The gathering of developers in one place, coupled with a freeze on new features starting September 1 made for, as Lukas Tinkl said, "wow, what a productive week :)". Here are some informative and educational links:

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Soccer Game

Rob Kaper, who is attending the conference is working on a port of monopd to Qt (away from STL). Check his writeup where he explains the advantages. Monopd is a game server daemon used by Atlantik, a distributed Monopoly game.

Tim Jansen made a presentation describing Knot, a desktop infrastructure server. The application uses the SLP (service location protocol) to search for services on a LAN. www.tjansen.de/knot has slides and documents describing the application.

There was a fuss about a commit by Neil Stevens, who added this code to the 4 applications he wrote and maintains.

s_aboutData->addCredit("United States Army", I18N_NOOP("Preserving the freedom that made this software possible"));

Whether one agrees or disagrees with the sentiments expressed, it was deemed unacceptable that such political statements be included in applications. The author was asked to remove the lines, but refused. George Staikos did so, stating curtly that he removes all such things, and will ignore any further discussion on the matter. Shortly afterwards Neil removed the applications from the KDE repository. The applications in question are the hayes noatun-plugin, Megami, Kit and Kaboodle. They are available http://www.hakubi.us

Editorial comment: When I saw this commit, my first reaction was wondering if the US Army was funding free software. On a second reading, no. So the comments have no place in KDE software. People from all over the world are using and contributing to this project. People who, in this divided world, would otherwise have very little in common. This community is precious and fragile, so let's preserve it.

My last attempt to build KDE was Aug 29, 2003, at around 10PM Pacific time. Only Kopete successfully built. Since what I am running is from Aug 24, the last time kdelibs and kdebase built for me, I won't comment on any bugs that are apparent.

Stephan Kulow wrote on kde-core-devel: