prev
Issue 13
2nd July 2006
by Danny Allen
next


This Week...
PDF hyperlink and file editing support in KViewShell. DVI format support in Okular. Continued progress in "WorKflow", "GMail-style conversation view for KMail" and "KDevelop-teamwork" Summer Of Code projects. BsFilter and DSpam tools are now supported in the KMail anti-spam wizard. LastFM stream support becomes more robust and polished, alongside other notable development work in Amarok. Aesthetic modifications made in Kmplot and Kalzium. KDE 4 changes: Work begins on the "Cokoon" widget style, and KSpell2 is renamed "Sonnet" in preparation for some interesting development work.

This week marks the commencement of the KDE Four Core developer meeting in Norway. Thiago Maceira introduces the event:
In another event in the series of meetings leading to the KDE 4.0 release, the developers of the core libraries will meet in the Norwegian woods from July 1st to July 7th. This meeting, co-sponsored by Trolltech and SuSE, is labelled KDE Four Core, as it is intended to be the direct successor of the KDE Three Beta and KDE Three meetings, that led to the refining of KDE releases 2.0 and 3.0 respectively. But, unlike those, this meeting is only one in a series of "KDE Four" meetings, that started with KDE Four Multimedia.

KDE Four Core has been organised by the Technical Working Group and aims at stabilising kdelibs, kdebase and the new module kdepimlibs and to lay foundation to the porting and development of the KDE 4.0 applications. For this reason and to create a group with coherent focus, the number of developers invited was limited to 24, selected among those who are most active in the porting efforts of the target modules. The meeting has been timed so that most of the new technologies are in the Subversion repository already, but sufficient time is left for other meetings before the final "sprint", which is expected to happen during the aKademy 2006 hacking sessions.

Will Stephenson has a short but to-the-point comment on the meeting:
The team that the Technical Working Group have assembled here are a highly motivated group and we're going to work our socks off for eight days to get kdelibs to a position where the rest of the KDE community can pick it up and start to write KDE 4 apps without the rules changing every week.

And naturally, Aaron Seigo has more insights from deep within the camp:
there are already over 15 of us here with more set to arrive this evening. qt 4.2 is in qt-copy, kdelibs builds against it, there's a copy of kdebase in branches/work/bleedingedge that we will be working on against trunk/kdelibs, icrecream is humming and the meeting is coming to order nicely.

i've already seen some cool qt demos while here, including one that uses the java bindings ... they are amazing. the resulting apps are fast and good looking. other cool stuff are the new docker window animations in qmainwindow which are just gorgeous and smooth.

i get the feeling more than ever that kde4 really takes off here ..... =)

Here is a photo of the partial KDE Four Core group. Look out next week for a full roundup of the meeting - at the end of the week, the participants should be further up the mountain.

The premier development meeting of the year - Akademy 2006, which will be held in Dublin, Ireland at the end of September - has opened for registration. Anybody interested in the future development of KDE is welcome, including "developers, translators, other free software projects, representatives of the software industry and ISVs interested in using free desktops and the KDE application framework". The meeting promises to be an intense and rewarding opportunity to meet fellow KDE participants and define the shape of the KDE 4 offering. See you there!

Stefan Kebekus writes a note regarding new functionality in KViewShell:
Essentially, we have added support for PDF file editing to kviewshell. With kviewshell, the user can now do the following:
  • assemble PDF file (i.e. insert and delete pages)
  • edit metadata (author, keywords, title ...)
  • set background watermarks
This functionality that was constantly asked for by many of our users, and we regqard this as a big step forward. There is also a version of kviewshell for KDE 3 that offers the same functionality available in KDE SVN at

/branches/work/kviewshell-0.7/kviewshell

This version requires the latest developement version of the poppler library. We will come up with a full release for KDE 3 in the near future.

Alexander Neundorf writes a comprehensive article on the migration of the KDE buildsystem to CMake. Alexander makes an interesting observation at the end of his article on the current development status of KDE 4:
Let me say one last word about the current state of KDE4: it compiles, and it runs -- but it crashes very often right now. It does not yet show off many features beyond what KDE3 offers. The compiled kdelibs4 and kdebase4 at this point in time look very much like KDE 3.5 (but made completely unstable). The main difference is that under its hood now ticks Qt4 instead of Qt3. This is the required foundation that now lets us go forward with the "real" development.

Right now, KDE4's code base gets added in code modifications, code refactorizations and new code. But none of the cool new core technologies: (solid, plasma, phonon, oxygen, akonadi, decibel and more) are in a usable state. KDE4 at this moment is completely uninteresting to end-users, they should wait at least for the first technology preview tentatively planned for late autumn of this year. If you are a developer, things are different: come and help us write the code. The fun starts now! :-)


Statistics
Commits: 2218 by 194 developers, 5451 lines modified, 2396 new files.
Open Bugs: 12778
Open Wishes: 11157
Bugs Opened: 284 in the last 7 days.
Bugs Closed: 227 in the last 7 days.

Commit Summary
Module Commits
/trunk/KDE
472
/trunk/www
362
/trunk/extragear
356
/trunk/l10n
301
/trunk/playground
172
/branches/stable
160
/branches/work
70
/branches/KDE
68
/trunk/koffice
63
/branches/koffice
55
Lines Developer Commits
194
Laurent Montel
96
88
David Faure
56
136
Gilles Caulier
54
90
Mark Kretschmann
51
92
Dirk Mueller
49
566
Allen Winter
49
106
Frans Englich
42
40
Ludovic Grossard
40
93
Pino Toscano
37
85
Wilfried Huss
37

Internationalisation (i18n) Status
Language Percentage Complete
Portuguese
100.00%
Swedish
99.99%
Danish
99.75%
Spanish
95.99%
Dutch
94.69%
French
94.19%
Italian
94.47%
Greek
93.55%
Estonian
92.44%
German
90.44%

Bug Killers and Buzz
Bug Killer Number Of Bugs Closed
Seb Ruiz
39
Alexandre Pereira de Oliveira
25
Stefan Borggraefe
24
Tommi Tervo
23
Eike Hein
15
Philip Rodrigues
14
Thiago Macieira
11
Olivier Goffart
10
Mark Kretschmann
9
Aurélien Gâteau
8

Program Buzz
Amarok
  2736
Kopete
  1246
K3B
  928
KMail
  831
Kate
  811
SuperKaramba
  637
Kontact
  598
KDevelop
  591
Kicker
  528
aKregator
  414


Person Buzz
Tom Chance
  415
Zack Rusin
  403
Waldo Bastian
  370
Scott Wheeler
  325
George Staikos
  325
Aaron Seigo
  317
David Faure
  301
Kurt Pfeifle
  292
John Tapsell
  291
Cornelius Schumacher
  281
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
Graphics
Andrew Walker committed changes in /trunk/extragear/graphics/kst/src:
BUG:129256 Allow user to enforce a minimum font size
Diffs: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 Revision 555499
View Visual Changes (to 1 file)

Albert Astals Cid committed a change to /branches/KDE/3.5/kdegraphics/kpdf/part.cpp:
Make the watch function work too when opening ps files through ps2pdf
BUGS: 130000

Ei, that's a nice bug number :-D
Diff Revision 556704

KDE-Base
Andreas Kling committed a change to /branches/KDE/3.5/kdelibs/kate/part/katerenderer.cpp:
If a line is partially selected and is the first in a multi-line selection,
we have to fill the right side with the selection color.

BUG: 130015
Diff Revision 556297

Maks Orlovich committed changes in /branches/KDE/3.5/kdelibs/khtml:
Make this show-popups-thingie a bit less of a DanglingPointerTown.
Fixes crashes on browsing away from cnn.com, other sites.
BUG:129187
Diffs: 1, 2 Revision 556326

KDE-PIM
Aron Boström committed a change to /trunk/KDE/kdepim/views/conversationview/conversationdelegate.cpp:
SoC. completely remove hardcoded colors and use QPalette instead. furthermore, clean up unneeded code.
Diff Revision 556474

Aron Boström committed changes in /trunk/KDE/kdepim/views/conversationview:
SoC. Sorting is working again! Hurray! And now in The Right Way(tm) with a QModelSortFilterProxy.
Diffs: 1, 2 Revision 556699

Multimedia
Mark Kretschmann committed changes in /trunk/extragear/multimedia/amarok/src:
* Implemented a clever memory management strategy for QHttp objects, simple and very effective. No more leaks.
* ban() was connected to the wrong slot. We copied this bug from muesli's player code.
Diffs: 1, 2 Revision 554776

Alexandre Pereira de Oliveira committed a change to /trunk/extragear/multimedia/amarok/src/playlist.cpp:
Loading a smart playlist would turn random off.
BUG: 129868
Diff Revision 555340

Andrew Turner committed a change to /trunk/extragear/multimedia/amarok/src/collectiondb.cpp:
Make score be displayed in Context Browser again. Problem was due to sqlite upgrade, where
new version returns a REAL from ROUND, instead of TEXT, and QString::toInt does not like
to convert "75.0". Fixed by casting the REAL to INTEGER in the SQL query.
Thanks to cocobo, Spum and Richlv for finding and diagnosing the problem.
Diff Revision 556153

Jocke Andersson committed changes in /trunk/extragear/multimedia/amarok/src:
Make the Extended Info thingie remember its height. Yay.
Also make it non-snappable, since snapping it would be confusing, it has its own hiding function.
Diffs: 1, 2 Revision 556215

Andrew Turner committed changes in /trunk/extragear/multimedia/amarok:
Fix pressing return in the search bar of the Collection Browser so that it always acts on
the search string typed, rather than on the currently displayed items (which may not yet
have been updated to reflect a change in the string).