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Issue 91
30th December 2007
by Danny Allen
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This Week...
Furious last-minute application of polish across the board in preparation for the tagging of KDE 4.0 Final next week. Work towards threading GDB operations support in KDevelop. Support for media players employing the MPRIS standard in the Plasma "Now Playing" data engine, with the import of a Flickr Plasmoid. A style manager, support for Karbon gradients and lots of colourspace work in Krita. Various improvements in the Eigen2 math vector library. Continued progress in the KBugBuster rewrite. Revived support for .tar, .tar.gz, and .tar.bz2 files in Ark. More work on KCabinet, a library to support the MS Cabinet format. A printing framework in Okteta. System Settings moves from a custom view to Dolphin's KCategorizedView. Finishing touches in the Oxygen widget style and colour schemes. Work from the "newssl" branch is moved back into kdelibs. Various unfinished features hidden in Konsole for KDE 4.0. The Trolltech Phonon backends are moved from kdebase to kdereview for KDE 4.0. The unmaintained "regexpeditor" moves from kdeutils to playground/utils.

Kåre Särs introduces Glimpse, a new scanning application for KDE 4:
Glimpse is a basic image scanning application for KDE 4. Glimpse uses the new libksane library from extragear, instead of the old libkscan. Glimpse provides the file saving features while the scan dialog and scan options are handled by libksane.
Scanner selection dialog (libksane)Image saving options dialog (Glimpse)
Advanced optionsAll options

I have been missing a good Open Source scanning application that would be easy to understand (Kooka and XSane don't feel right to me). I first planned to modify libkscan, but I could not figure out the code, so I made my own :)

Glimpse is actually a byproduct while libksane is the main target. For Glimpse, I want to provide easy saving of the scanned images, both providing a save dialog for every scanned image and a possibility to autosave the images in a specific directory.

My goal with libksane is to provide easy access to the most-needed scan parameters, while still giving the possibility to use the advanced (and not so common options) of the SANE backends.

libksane is usable, but can still be tweaked. Things that hopefully make libksane interesting are that it supports 16-bit colors (6 bytes/pixel) and that the UI is (in my opinion) a bit better than that of libkscan. With libksane you can also reach almost all options available from the backends (this is not possible with libkscan).

Things left to do:
  • Doxygen documentation is needed :)
  • The parameters don't yet have tooltips to explain what they are for.
  • The names of the scan options come from the SANE library, so the translation is a problem not yet solved.
  • The parameters are now grouped with a dropdown box into basic, advanced and 'All options'. This could be regrouped with a tabbed interface.
The things listed above are mainly short-term goals. I also want to improve the usability of the application - at the moment, using the libksane dialog without a mouse is not very easy, which could be improved.

I also hope that others will want to use libksane for scanning support in their projects.

As an aside, the name of the application (Glimpse) is found in over 20 milion web pages (Google) and there even is a glimpse.com. It might be that we need another name!

Stephan Binner writes a reminder note about the upcoming KDE 4.0 release (in an attempt to reign in wildly over-optimistic expectations by some users):
Before everyone starts to spread their opinion about KDE 4.0, let me spread some reminders:
  • KDE 4.0 is not KDE4 but only the first (4.0.0 even non-bugfix) release in a years-long KDE 4 series to come.
  • KDE 4.0 is known to have missing parts or temporary implementations (eg. printing, PIM, Plasma).
  • Most changes happened under the surface and cannot be discovered in a "30 minutes usage" review anyway.
  • User interfaces being unchanged in 4.0 compared to 3.5 may be still changed/improved during KDE 4 life time.
  • KDE 4.0 will not be the fastest KDE 4 release - like for KDE 2 most speed optimizations will happen later during KDE 4.
  • Most applications (many are not even fully ported yet) will take only advantage of new features which the new Qt/KDE libraries offer later.
  • Don't measure portability success (eg. MS Windows) by current availability of application releases, they will come.
  • KDE 4.0 is only expected to be used by early adopters, not every KDE 3.5 user (and IMHO KDE 4.0 shouldn't be pushed onto other user types like planned for Kubuntu ShipIt (which by the way is said to have only 6 months support for its packages)).
  • KDE 4.1 development will not require the same amount of time as the big technology jump of KDE 4.0: expect KDE 4.1 later this year.
Last, again: KDE 4.0 is not KDE 4.

I know it's traditional at this time of year to have a retrospective of the acheivements of the previous 12 months, but with the imminent release of KDE 4.0 (due to be tagged on the 4th of January), i've found it difficult to get contributions from developers who are furiously applying as much polish as possible in what is now the final lap of a several year development marathon. These last-minute changes explain the small amount of work on features this week in KDE SVN, and also the reduced number of selected commits in this Digest - such commits generally don't make interesting reading!

Still, although 2007 was not the most outwardly-visible year for the KDE project (with the last major release in November 2005), from an insider's point of view, it was certainly the most significant in the history of the project, with the foundation for around 5 years of future releases being quietly built (well, I like to make a little noise in this publication). And surely with KDE 4, 2008 stands to be yet more important.

Major highlights for me are the improved organisation and non-programming aspects of the project - features such as the "Road to KDE 4" by Troy Unrau, the emergence of Oxygen as a team which consistently rivals professional, commercial graphics designers, and the often thankless, invisible work of people like Sebastian Kügler, Wade Olson and countless others like them - are all things which I remember about KDE distinctly in 2007. And just as Time Magazine sometimes labels whole groups of people as their "Person of the Year", the KDE Commit-Digest Person of the Year would go to the KDE contributors who's work is not always immediately visible, but almost always vital - translators, documentation, and so many more.

Massive thanks to all who donated over the past week to the "lets-get-dannya-a-new-laptop" fund. Though I said I had no expectations, I confess that I had a small target that I would at least like to have reached (like, say, $200) - and the donations not only reached that target, but exceeded it several times over. Waking up each morning to more donations really put a smile on my face.

So I will now be getting a new laptop, if not in time for the KDE 4.0 release on January 11th, at least in time for the KDE 4 Launch Party in Mountain View, California, where I should (just about!) be able to find someone to install the newly-released onto it. Despite the cautionary note of Stephan above, i'm really excited - not only for what KDE 4 currently is, but for what is possible and what it will become.


Statistics
Commits: 2661 by 207 developers, 8574 lines modified, 1920 new files.
Open Bugs: 15310
Open Wishes: 13398
Bugs Opened: 246 in the last 7 days.
Bugs Closed: 174 in the last 7 days.

Commit Summary
Module Commits
/trunk/l10n-kde4
1053
/trunk/KDE
815
/trunk/koffice
177
/trunk/playground
160
/trunk/extragear
139
/branches/work
70
/trunk/www
64
/trunk/l10n-kde3
46
/branches/stable
41
/trunk/kdesupport
29
Lines Developer Commits
466
Jakob Petsovits
132
129
Allen Winter
118
222
Pino Toscano
99
160
Emanuele Tamponi
69
416
Thomas McGuire
67
137
Albert Astals Cid
66
211
Laurent Montel
62
124
Marta Rybczyńska
62
122
Michel Ludwig
50
1697
Urs Wolfer
47

Internationalisation (i18n) Status
Language Percentage Complete
Greek
99.97%
Swedish
99.71%
Portuguese
99.58%
Japanese
94.76%
Estonian
90.02%
German
89.91%
Spanish
88.40%
Polish
87.56%
Low Saxon
85.83%
Chinese Traditional
85.64%

Bug Killers and Buzz
Bug Killer Number Of Bugs Closed
Leonardo Finetti
29
Jason Stubbs
18
Pino Toscano
14
Christian Esken
13
Urs Wolfer
12
Seb Ruiz
11
Thomas McGuire
11
Maks Orlovich
7
Aaron J. Seigo
7
Robert Knight
7

Program Buzz
Plasma
  8258
Amarok
  6915
KMail
  3770
K3B
  3630
Kopete
  3510
Solid
  2599
Kate
  2443
SuperKaramba
  2127
KDevelop
  2055
Kontact
  1521


Person Buzz
Tobias Hunger
  4110
Allen Winter
  2515
Stephan Kulow
  2265
David Faure
  2225
Stephan Binner
  1158
Laurent Montel
  1058
Torsten Rahn
  940
Jonathan Riddell
  858
Bram Schoenmakers
  844
Thiago Macieira
  724
Commit Countries

Commit Demographics
Sex
91 %       Male
5.64 %       Female
3.49 %       (unknown)
Motivation
58.9 %       Volunteer
32 %       (unknown)
8.01 %       Commercial
 
Ages
59.2 %       (unknown)
20.9 %       25 to 34
19.2 %       18 to 24
6.24 %       45 to 54
4.70 %       35 to 44
1.25 %       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
KDE-Base
Marco Martin committed changes in /trunk/KDE/kdebase/workspace:
White icon text on a semitransparent black background
Bug 154108: Filenames under icons not easily readable
Diffs: 1, 2 Revision 752098
View Visual Changes (to 1 file)

Germain Garand committed a change to /trunk/KDE/kdelibs/khtml/rendering/render_box.cpp:
do not accept mousewheel events on overflow containers when there is no scrollbar in the corresponding direction.

so one may wheel-scroll lxr.kde.org's annotated sources
Diff Revision 752350

David Faure committed changes in /trunk/KDE/kdebase/apps:
Move a bunch of Go menu actions from konqueror to dolphinpart, so that they don't clutter the Go menu when using other parts. As posted on k-c-d.
Diffs: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 Revision 752408

Maksim Orlovich committed changes in /trunk/KDE/kdelibs/khtml/ecma/debugger:
Incrementally update the viewer document when loading fragments. Fixed the worst ofperformance problems..
Diffs: 1, 2 Revision 752882

Robert Knight committed changes in /trunk/KDE/kdebase/apps/konsole/src:
Fix serious bug where starting Konsole with arguments such as -e,--workdir or -p made changes to the default profile which applied to other Konsole windows and were saved on exit.

Problem fixed by creating a new hidden profile which inherits from the window's default profile and applying the property changes to that.

Modify SessionManager so that hidden profiles are not saved to disk.
Diffs: 1, 2, 3, 4 Revision 753735

KDE-PIM
Thomas McGuire committed changes in