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Issue 78
30th September 2007
by Danny Allen
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This Week...
Beginnings of a list view, and an applet browser integrated into Plasma. Optimisations in Konqueror. More work, including image practice support in Parley. XMP metadata support in Digikam, with new splashscreens announced. Work on playlists in Amarok 2. The Noatun music player becomes a KPart, with musings on its KDE 4 future. Further work on Phonon, with developments on the GStreamer backend. KNetworkManager is ported to work with NetworkManager 0.7. Deep refactoring in the Eigen 2 library rewrite. Kickoff is ported to KDE 4 as a candidate menu replacement option. A plan is hatched to get Kopete ready for the KDE 4.0 release. Import of the KBreakout game to playground/games in KDE SVN. Final moves in the recent KDE SVN reorganisation effort. The KDE Bug Tracker starts to be upgraded to Bugzilla 3.0.

Koos Vriezen writes an update on KMPlayer:
KMPlayer is a browser plugin for Konqueror for multimedia videos, and now, also for Flash. When Flash is configured for swfdec, KMPlayer offers a complete Open Source implementation for video in HTML pages. There is also a simple KDE application that also allows viewing of video from other media than network streams.

Quicktime, MS Media Player and Real all have special attributes that an HTML author can use to control these players, likewise for javascript bindings. KMPlayer tries to support all of these. Especially MPlayer has problems with XML playlists and RAM files. So support for these and others is also implemented.

The project was never planned ahead much. All versions of this program have some major refactoring somewhere. Looking at its current state, what is noticeable is that there are multiple small programs that do the actual playing out of the browser process and it has playlist data in memory using custom DOM trees.

The former of course increases stability of the hosting application and also follows the UNIX philosophy of single task programs well. The latter makes KMPlayer playlist formats support easily extendable for new XML formats like the latest addition of XSPF, but also a more in-depth support for SMIL.

The SMIL support had a big boost by moving the rendering code to a visitor and by replacing the ad-hoc painting code with Cairo, a cross-desktop graphics library.

Image and text mediatypes are rendered on off-screen Cairo surfaces, making transitions like fading possible. Also, using Cairo pixmap surfaces as little as possible and heavy caching of these should make any improvements of the Cairo backends (like XRender or OpenGL) improve the rendering speed of SMIL movies.


My longer term goals for the work include replacing the whole GUI with a SMIL file. Whether this will ever happen is yet to seen. For example, when comparing with the Flash media player of YouTube, SMIL has no support for mouse drag for the volume slider, nor for creating editors or clipboard access. Nevertheless, it's KMPlayer's holy grail :-)

Matt Rogers puts out a call to get Kopete in shape for the KDE 4.0 release:
For KDE 4.0, we had previously decided to hold Kopete out of the release because we wanted to release Kopete 1.0 with KDE 4.0 and have it be all nice and pretty and totally rockin! We've changed our mind and decided to go ahead and release Kopete with KDE 4.0 and not call it 1.0. Right now, most of the work needs to be focused on fixing bugs since we're in feature freeze.

The call for developers that I put out late last week is designed to get some folks who are motivated to help out with Kopete development.

Fixing bugs is actually a good way to get started with the code and so that's what I'm suggesting new developers do for now. Soon, a new branch for feature development will be started and then people can get started on the sexy stuff :)

Right now, Kopete is basically a straight port from KDE 3 to KDE 4 as you can see from the screenshot:


Long term ideas and goals can be seen on the Techbase wiki at http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Kopete/Roadmap. We hope to implement most of these for KDE 4.1.

It seems crazy to me, but I guess it's possible that readers of the Digest could not be aware of the existence of PlanetKDE, the aggregation of blogs from KDE contributors around the world. For those of you who are interested in KDE development and community and are not yet reading PlanetKDE, it really is the ideal counterpart to this publication!


Statistics
Commits: 3178 by 232 developers, 7737 lines modified, 1760 new files.
Open Bugs: 14433
Open Wishes: 13094
Bugs Opened: 165 in the last 7 days.
Bugs Closed: 104 in the last 7 days.

Commit Summary
Module Commits
/trunk/KDE
1075
/trunk/l10n-kde4
637
/branches/work
235
/branches/stable
186
/trunk/extragear
166
/trunk/playground
160
/trunk/www
131
/trunk/kdesupport
121
/trunk/koffice
103
/trunk/l10n-kde3
98
Lines Developer Commits
318
Gilles Caulier
138
751
Laurent Montel
109
420
Volker Krause
108
120
Frederik Gladhorn
91
74
Karl Ove Hufthammer
74
290
Till Adam
74
129
Ludovic Grossard
73
462
Clarence Dang
63
132
David Faure
61
114
Sebastian Trueg
60

Internationalisation (i18n) Status
Language Percentage Complete
Swedish
99.80%
Portuguese
98.95%
Greek
95.55%
Japanese
94.58%
Chinese Traditional
86.08%
Dutch
85.83%
Spanish
84.56%
German
83.69%
Low Saxon
76.87%
Nepali
76.38%

Bug Killers and Buzz
Bug Killer Number Of Bugs Closed
Matt Rogers
17
Tommi Tervo
15
Frederik Gladhorn
12
Seb Ruiz
10
Andrew Walker
6
Joris Guisson
6
Andre Duffeck
6
Luboš Luňák
4
Peter C. Ndikuwera
4
Andreas Pakulat
3

Program Buzz
Amarok
  6305
K3B
  5640
KMail
  5120
Kopete
  4330
Kontact
  3948
Kate
  3880
KDevelop
  3205
digiKam
  2798
Kicker
  2436
SuperKaramba
  2154


Person Buzz
David Faure
  856
Sebastian Kügler
  854
Stephan Kulow
  771
Matthias Kretz
  654
Adriaan de Groot
  630
Allen Winter
  629
Waldo Bastian
  440
Aaron J. Seigo
  364
Boudewijn Rempt
  340
George Staikos
  322
Commit Countries

Commit Demographics
Sex
94 %       Male
2.97 %       (unknown)
2.53 %       Female
Motivation
40 %       Volunteer
43.9 %       (unknown)
16.3 %       Commercial
 
Ages
64.3 %       (unknown)
23.1 %       25 to 34
7.52 %       18 to 24
2.97 %       35 to 44
2.23 %       45 to 54
0.595 %       Under 18


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
Development Tools
Josef Weidendorfer committed changes in /trunk/KDE/kdesdk/kcachegrind/kcachegrind:
kcachegrind: Fix automatic position of birds-eye view of call graph

This partly was screwed up because the qt3to4 script replaced e.g. TopLeft of a enum in CallGraphView to "Qt::TopLeftCorner", which is way off.

This also adds a further "position", namely to hide to birds-eye view.

And finally, this gets rid of one use of Q3PopupMenu by making QAction's from the menu items to choose the position of the birds-eye view.
Diffs: 1, 2 Revision 716508

Educational
Frederik Gladhorn committed a change to /branches/KDE/3.5/kdeedu/kvoctrain/kvoctrain/kvt-core/kvoctraindoc.cpp:
Make search search in all columns.
In KDE4 this has been fixed for quite some time and search is overall much improved.
Bug 93449: The search function only searches in vocabulary of the currently...
Diff Revision 717408

KDE-Base
Maksim Orlovich committed a change to /trunk/KDE/kdelibs/kdeui/dialogs/kpassworddialog.cpp:
Don't focus on the password field when username isn't really known (e.g. when kpasswdserver uses this). Now I can go to my uni webmail, and the password dialog will nicely focus on username.

(Shame the auth requires reload...)
Diff Revision 715942

Maksim Orlovich committed changes in /trunk/KDE/kdebase/workspace/kwin/kcmkwin/kwindecoration:
Fix this up so I can drag things around properly, and have them get to their destination without getting misplaced or a crash.

In short, keeping iterators to a changing QList is a Bad Idea(tm), so I did the simple thing can used indices.
Diffs: 1, 2 Revision 715952

Adam Treat committed changes in /trunk/KDE/kdelibs:
In older versions of Qt, the call to restoreState is causing bad flicker in the toolbars and menus. This happens for instance when switching between tabs in Konqueror. This is apparently fixed in Qt 4.4+ since it uses alien child windows.

Konqueror no longer flashes when switching between tabs.
Diffs: 1, 2 Revision 716094

Peter Penz committed a change to /trunk/KDE/kdebase/apps/dolphin/src/dolphincolumnview.cpp:
don't forget to create missing columns when the URL is changed from e. g. "/home/peter/Temp" to "/home/peter/Temp/a/b/c" by e. g. the back button
Diff Revision 716208