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Issue 50
18th March 2007
by Danny Allen
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This Week...
Interface experiments in Amarok 2.0, with the aKode engine shown the door. Initial work on incremental parsing functionality in KDevelop. Further functional development in the Step educational physics simulation package. More refinement of the Oxygen-themed KDE Games artwork, revised sounds in the Oxygen sound theme and more work done on the Oxygen widget style. The Oxygen iconset is dual-licenced as Creative Commons and LGPL. Support for the Plucker document format in okular. Zoom work (ViewBar) and Coverity fixes in KOffice. Basic Phishing protection and the start of user documentation in Mailody. Optimisations in KJS (JavaScript interpreter) and KSysGuard. Import of Athec into playground/games and KBackup to playground/utils in KDE SVN. First NEPOMUK-based GUI elements appear. KSplashX displaces KSplashML as the splash screen engine for KDE 4.

John Tapsell talks about recent work in KSysGuard, and its integration in the wider desktop:
KSysGuard has been moving towards a more modular approach, so that the Process List, various graphs, etc. are true Qt widgets that can be used in any application.

The migration of the Process List is almost complete now, as you can see from the screenshot.


This will be added to a dialog box in the new Plasma KRunner. KRunner will always be loaded in the background and provides a few lightweight 'programs' that require near-zero start up effort and resources, such as the Run dialog and this new Task List dialog.

The main focus for KSysGuard at the moment has been making it as fast and as lightweight as possible, as well as being easier to use and more user friendly (like the reduction of the number of columns in the default view: no more VmSize (column is hidden by default), VmRSS no longer exists, replaced with much more informative "Memory" and "Shared Memory" display).

Jos van den Oever provides an overview of the recent move of Strigi into kdelibs and its implications for the wider desktop porting effort:
Monday was a red day for the KDE build dashboard. This was the day that KFilePlugin was removed from kdelibs. In fact, dashboard is still mostly red because of this move. The KFilePlugin class has been a great success in KDE3 and there are many implementations of it. So it is no wonder that removing it causes many problems.

KFilePlugin has been removed to be split up into reading and writing plugins. The writing plugins are very similar to what we have now, but the read plugins are radically different and this is where KDE4 will see an enhancement and speed up of the extraction of metadata.

The exposure of the strigi API to the KDE developers this week led to cleaner code, better win32 support and the implementation of many wishes for making it easier to write analyzers.

Since the tutorial on writing analyzers and the list of plugins to be ported were put online, many porting efforts were started. Some plugins will be ported when nice analyzer interfaces are ready. Two of these are planned (in addition to StreamEndAnalyzer and StreamThroughAnalyzer):
  • StreamSaxAnalyzer will let the analyzer react to SAX events that occur while parsing a file. XML is used for many file formats these days and this will save a lot of duplicated work. The StreamSaxAnalyzers will all be called from a StreamThroughAnalyzer which means that you can run multiple analyses in parallel. This is useful for mixed formats such as RDF embedded in HTML.
  • StreamLineAnalyzer will let the analyzer react to each line that is read in a text file. The line will be reported as UTF-8, regardless of the encoding of original stream. This saves the analyzer implementor many headaches.
The StreamSaxAnalyzer is easy to implement and it will be added this week. The StreamLineAnalyzer will come a bit later, because it is a bit trickier to write.

About eight KFilePlugins allow writing of data to a file. This is something Strigi cannot handle and this functionality will go into a new KService, KFileWritePlugin. The first of these can be found in kdegraphics: kfilewrite_jpeg.cpp.

All in all the red color of dashboard should fade in the next week or two. I hope many more will help make this happen and would like to thank all the brave developers that already dove in and committed ported analyzers.

Casper Boemann discusses the development of Zoom tools in KOffice:
We have recently ported the Zoom tool from Krita to KOffice-wide usage. The Zoom tool and the ViewBar are two different ways of controlling the zoom level when viewing documents.

The ViewBar is located to the right of the statusbar and its slider to control the zoom is very nice. As Cyrille Berger said the other day, "I really miss it in KOffice 1.6!". If developers of other document viewing apps read this, please contact me so we can determine how to spread the ViewBar to the rest of KDE.

The Zoom tool (which is an old favorite from Krita and other drawing apps) is now ported to all KOffice applications.

We faced some problems to get the two functions to work together nicely, so we had to refactor that part of Flake (develop some extra classes and modified their responsibilities).


Statistics
Commits: 2275 by 225 developers, 4741 lines modified, 1208 new files.
Open Bugs: 13121
Open Wishes: 12389
Bugs Opened: 254 in the last 7 days.
Bugs Closed: 165 in the last 7 days.

Commit Summary
Module Commits
/trunk/KDE
756
/trunk/extragear
283
/trunk/playground
201
/trunk/l10n
197
/branches/stable
187
/trunk/koffice
152
/branches/work
145
/trunk/kdesupport
87
/trunk/www
72
/branches/KDE
70
Lines Developer Commits
209
Gilles Caulier
110
174
Laurent Montel
80
153
David Faure
75
140
Stephan Kulow
67
132
Dirk Mueller
66
63
Jos van den Oever
58
150
Thomas Zander
51
138
Allen Winter
46
48
Dan Meltzer
43
38
Peter Hedlund
38

Internationalisation (i18n) Status
Language Percentage Complete
Portuguese
100.00%
Dutch
96.86%
Estonian
94.52%
French
92.80%
British English
86.84%
Polish
86.60%
Turkish
84.32%
Galician
86.25%
Russian
81.75%
Catalan
78.33%

Bug Killers and Buzz
Bug Killer Number Of Bugs Closed
Bram Schoenmakers
48
Philip Rodrigues
23
Albert Astals Cid
19
Tommi Tervo
17
Thomas McGuire
11
Gilles Caulier
8
Shriramana Sharma
8
Stephan Kulow
7
Pino Toscano
6
Sebastian Trueg
6

Program Buzz
Amarok
  2860
KMail
  2180
Kate
  1952
K3B
  1940
KDevelop
  1864
Kopete
  1646
digiKam
  1183
KTorrent
  1126
Kicker
  1033
Kaffeine
  1016


Person Buzz
David Faure
  738
Adriaan de Groot
  684
Stephan Kulow
  666
Waldo Bastian
  436
Aaron J. Seigo
  422
Thomas Zander
  301
George Staikos
  284
Boudewijn Rempt
  212
Thiago Macieira
  202
Stephan Binner
  185
Commit Countries

Commit Demographics
Sex
93.0 %       Male
5.55 %       (unknown)
0.658 %       Female
Motivation
40.7 %       Volunteer
39.9 %       (unknown)
18.4 %       Commercial
 
Ages
67.8 %       (unknown)
20.0 %       25 to 34
6.44 %       18 to 24
4.65 %       35 to 44
0.141 %       Under 18
0.094 %       45 to 54


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
Albert Astals Cid committed changes in /branches/KDE/3.5/kdegraphics/kpdf:
Fix emission of window caption for remote files and for kpdf windows restored by the session manager
Bug 142906: Caption should ommit file://
Diffs: 1, 2, 3 Revision 642287

KDE-PIM
Allen Winter committed a change to /branches/work/kdepim-3.5.5+/kmail/kmcomposewin.cpp:
Fix "Messed up text conaining german umlauts in html messages when they were saved in drafts folder and opened again from there".

Patch from Michal Bukovsky, thanks Michal!
Diff Revision 643330

Multimedia
Alexandre Pereira de Oliveira committed changes in /branches/stable/extragear/multimedia/amarok/src:
Lots of typos and untranslated strings.
Thanks a lot to Biro Arpad for compiling this list.
Bug 143104: Typo - Spelling errors and untranslatable strings in Amarok
Diffs: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 (+ 2 more) Revision 643565
View Visual Changes (to 3 files)

Features
Development Tools
Hamish Rodda committed changes in /trunk/KDE/kdevelop/languages/cpp:
Start laying foundations for incremental parsing

Tried to re-enable the DUChain viewer, but alas it doesn't show up

Problem at the moment is that the background parser isn't being triggered with changes to text; and I really need the document controller back, too...
Diffs: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 (+ 3 more) Revision 642999

Kris Wong committed changes in /branches/kdevelop/3.4:
Updated the switch header/implementation functionality to search through the code model hierarchy starting with the global namespace rather than iterating through the project files.
Diffs: 1,