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Issue 10
11th June 2006
by Danny Allen
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This Week...
oKular gets a backend for the DjVu document format. amaroK is renamed Amarok. Guidance, a modular configuration GUI, gets a WINE module. Developments in the Kopete "OSCAR (AIM) File Transfer", "WorKflow" and "KDevelop C# Parser" Summer Of Code projects. KFormula, the KOffice formula component, defaults to the OpenDocument format.

Stephan Kulow announces a message unfreeze in preparation for KDE 3.5.4:
Hi!

After discussions on the kde-core-devel mailing list, it is decided to lift partially the message, documentation and feature freeze for the KDE 3.5 branch (modules in branches/KDE/3.5).

The period of the lift will be until 10th July 2006 (00:00 UTC).

For the GUI strings (also known as messages), you can fix typos and make small changes to them. You can also add new error messages to improve error feedback to users. (Adding other kinds of messages are not allowed. In case of questions or doubts, please ask the kde-i18n-doc@kde.org mailing list.)

For the documentation, the changes should also be rather small, except when fixing inaccurate or outdated documentation. You can also port documentation that has been prepared in the trunk/KDE modules. (If you change any documentation for the KDE 3.5 branch, please be sure that the change is also in the corresponding module of trunk/KDE. However you can do a little later, in case that you would not have much time during the lift period.)

In addition to that, the feature freeze as announced in [1] reapply to 3.5 branch during that period.

Greetings, Stephan

This week, the audio player formerly known as amaroK announced an official name change to Amarok. Mark Kretschmann, lead developer of Amarok, explains the reasons behind the move:
For those of you not following the mailing list, here's a copy of my arguments pro name change as discussed on the list, to help you understand our motivations behind the change:
  1. Misspelling of the name is inevitable. In many languages (e.g. French) it's downright an error and unacceptable to start a sentence without a capital letter. So in official media it is always going to be spelt "AmaroK" at the start of a sentence, and possibly also in mid sentence. We're provoking this misspelling.

    Here are some excerpts from the Helix engine desktop file:
    • Comment[et]=AmaroKi plugin
    • Comment[fr]=Module pour AmaroK

  2. It was a funny idea when Amarok was young, but nowadays it just seems quirky.
  3. The name is unusual enough not to require additional attention from special capitalization.
  4. Amarok is intended to be a software for all desktops, not just KDE. The capital K suggests that it's a KDE only application.
  5. Changing the name earlier is easier than later, assuming that our popularity is still growing.
  6. The Amarok logo does in no way reflect the current spelling. If anything, it looks like "amarOk".
  7. The various misspellings hurt name branding. There should be one brand "Amarok", and misspelling weakens our brand.

Though this change might seem trivial, it is representative of a concerted shift in marketing as we move towards KDE4:
  • Plasma
    Next-generation desktop layer.

  • Solid
    Seamless integration of hardware and networked devices.

  • Phonon
    Backend-independent multimedia layer.

  • Oxygen
    KDE4 visuals and icon theme.

  • Akonadi
    Extensible cross-desktop storage service for PIM data.

  • Decibel
    A service architecture to make chat and phone communication universally available across applications.
These project names, all without the traditional "K" prefix, reflect the growing strength of our brand and offerings - it is interesting that there appears to be a conscious effort to stay away from the letter "K" altogether, which at least goes someway to restoring the alphabetic balance.

Of course, these names all belong to new KDE technologies: what happens when an existing application attempts to rebrand? KSysGuard, the KDE System Monitor has undergone large changes as of recent weeks. In the words of Greg Martyn, one of the primary forces behind these optimisations:
Step #1 was recently completed. John Tapsell brought ksysguard load time down from 4 sec -> 1.5 sec and I brought ksysguardd load time down from 1.16 sec -> 0.19 sec. Combine those two patches, and you have what feels like a new program. These changes should have affected the applet as well, but I'll check to see if there is anything specific I can do to speed that up.

John and I are like starved dogs ready to take on UI complexity. We're bouncing ideas around, and will definitely be pushing some big improvements forward this summer. You don't have to worry about that.

In celebration of the rebirth of this application, this week Greg attempted to change the name of KSysGuard to kde-system-monitor. In a long thread, objections were raised with both the name (inconsistency with the current KDE naming schemes) and the renaming process.

So, for now the app remains KSysGuard. However, we can expect some interesting changes with this application (naming and otherwise) in the lead up to KDE 4.


Statistics
Commits: 2156 by 193 developers, 5432 lines modified, 1759 new files.
Open Bugs: 12646
Open Wishes: 11034
Bugs Opened: 307 in the last 7 days.
Bugs Closed: 247 in the last 7 days.

Commit Summary
Module Commits
/trunk/KDE
408
/trunk/www
340
/trunk/l10n
276
/trunk/extragear
190
/trunk/playground
187
/branches/stable
171
/branches/work
138
/trunk/koffice
95
/branches/KDE
95
/branches/koffice
69
Lines Developer Commits
446
Laurent Montel
144
654
Thiago Macieira
72
136
David Faure
70
223
Jaroslaw Staniek
49
116
Thomas Zander
45
69
Burkhard Lück
43
42
Ludovic Grossard
42
88
Stephan Kulow
41
60
Gilles Caulier
38
100
Frans Englich
38

Internationalisation (i18n) Status
Language Percentage Complete
Portuguese
100.00%
Danish
99.99%
Swedish
99.98%
Spanish
96.04%
Dutch
94.85%
French
94.17%
Italian
94.53%
Greek
93.54%
Estonian
92.39%
British English
90.51%

Bug Killers and Buzz
Bug Killer Number Of Bugs Closed
Kevin Ottens
42
Olivier Goffart
28
Thiago Macieira
25
Seb Ruiz
16
Luboš Luňák
15
Sebastian Trueg
9
Stephan Kulow
7
Allan Sandfeld Jensen
7
John Tapsell
7
Joris Guisson
6

Program Buzz
Amarok
  3344
Kopete
  1320
K3B
  892
KMail
  840
Kate
  833
SuperKaramba
  647
Kontact
  592
KDevelop
  551
Kicker
  523
aKregator
  409


Person Buzz
Tom Chance
  462
Waldo Bastian
  335
George Staikos
  315
Aaron Seigo
  311
Boudewijn Rempt
  292
David Faure
  278
Cornelius Schumacher
  275
Anne-Marie Mahfouf
  275
Stephan Kulow
  268
John Tapsell
  261
Contents
  Bug Fixes Features Optimise Security Other
Accessibility [*]
Development Tools [*] [*]
Educational [*] [*] [*]
Graphics [*] [*] [*] [*]
KDE-Base [*] [*] [*] [*]
KDE-PIM [*] [*] [*]
Office [*] [*] [*]
Konqueror
Multimedia [*] [*]
Networking Tools [*] [*] [*] [*]
User Interface [*] [*]
Utilities [*] [*] [*]
Games
Other [*]


Bug Fixes
Educational
Jason Harris committed changes in /trunk/KDE/kdeedu/kstars/kstars:
Fix bug causing large lag in Full updates. .The problem was that I was recreating an Earth object inside the loop
over all copmets and asteroids, even though the Component itself
contains the Earth object. Fixing this caused the timing for
SkyMapComposite::updatePlanets() to go from 1.4 seconds to 0.03
seconds!.I also fixed some other minor issues in skycomponents.Note: I have committed the TIMING code that I had earlier sent to the
list as patches, so we can continue to use this information for
profiling.
Diffs: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 Revision 549013

Jason Harris committed a change to /branches/KDE/3.5/kdeedu/libkdeedu/extdate/extdatetime.cpp:
Need to distinguish the long/short forms of month and day names with
i18n() comments. In particular, this is necessary for the month of May,
which has the same long/short form. For consistency, I added i18n()
comment strings to all short-form names.

This is a backport from trunk, it closes bug #127011
CCBUG: 127011
Diff Revision 549416
Discussion

Graphics
Marcel Wiesweg committed changes in /trunk/extragear/graphics/digikam:
Trying to solve the remaining media support problems

- apply Coolo's patch for resolving media:/ URLs (from #93569)
- close CameraUI cleanly
- ask user if he wants to cancel the current operation when closing
- cancel operation when closing
- delete object when closed
- dont add new tasks to the queue when closing
- Allow only once CameraUI per CameraType object
- store current UI with a QGuardedPtr
- when a non-closed UI is found up and running, raise it, dont create a new one
- when camera interface is called via DCOP (probably from media menu)
- call KWin::deIconifyWindow
- call KWin::activateWindow()
- do not compute image dimension when listing from a UMSCamera. This is a _huge_
speedup, say 5 minutes to 5 seconds.
- do only compute image dimension if requested in UMSCamera
- compute image dimension if not yet done in CameraItemPropertiesTab
- various speed and crash fixes in CameraUI/CameraIconView
- do not crash when the first item was deleted from camera and then removed from IconView
- do not request exif for items which will be deleted
- IconView: allow to delay updating frequency a bit
- use a ched itemRect for CameraIconView. Its faster, but more importantly,
there was a crash with a pretty long story

BUGS: 126112
CCBUGS: 127846, 93569
Diffs: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 (+ 9 more) Revision 549373

KDE-Base
David Faure committed a change to /branches/KDE/3.5/kdelibs/kjs/ustring.cpp:
Fix /. for Turkish users: use locale-independent toupper and tolower replacements.
BUG:128842
Diff Revision 549506

Diego Iastrubni committed a change to /branches/KDE/3.5/kdebase/konqueror/about/tips.html:
This fixes bug 128909.

Please when using CSS, don't align text to the left. This is the default
for most users, and it breaks RTL pages.
Diff Revision 549732

KDE-PIM
Michael Brade committed changes in /branches/KDE/3.5/kdepim/knotes:
rewrote the networking code to use KNetwork:
* fixed #110915: KNetwork has better error reporting than the previous
code, now it says "connection actively refused" instead of "No such
file or directory"
* fixed #110838: this one was caused by an uninitialize variable, so it
wasn't reproducible

BUG: 110838, 110915
Diffs: 1, 2 Revision 550047
Discussion

Multimedia
Sebastian Trueg committed changes in /branches/stable/extragear/multimedia/k3b:
Ignore case when comparing md5 sums.

BUG: 126601
Diffs: 1, 2, 3 Revision 549694

Sebastian Trueg committed changes in /branches/stable/extragear/multimedia/k3b:
Add a counter to a filename in case a file with the same name already exists in a data project's folder.
I will implement user intervention (a renaming dialog) for a later K3b version.

BUG: 128974
Diffs: 1, 2 Revision 550094

Networking Tools
Ivan Vasic committed changes in /trunk/extragear/network/ktorrent/plugins/infowidget:
Max share ratio is now float SpinBox. Fixes localization problems and it goes over 9.99 now.

Great thanks to Johan Widarsson for providing the patch.
BUG:128487
Diffs: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 Revision 548745
View Visual Changes (to 1 file)