Linux App Summit 2019 schedule is out!

We published the Linux App Summit 2019 schedule last week.

We have a bunch of interesting talks (sadly we had to leave almost 40 almost as interesting talks out, we had lots of awesome submissions!) ranging from flatpak and snaps to how product management is good for Free Software projects with some thought provoking talks thrown in to make us think what's the future of our platform.

I am going and you should totally come too!

The attendance is free but please register at https://events.linuxappsummit.org/

2 years since Catalan Independence Referendum, an update

Note 1: This is not KDE or Free Software related, if you're not interested, stop reading, no one is forcing you to read
Note 2: Yes, this is still going to Planet KDE, KDE friends and colleagues ask me about it almost every time we met, so there's definitely interest
Note 3: You're more than welcome to comment, but remember this blog is my house, so don't complain when i don't tolerate stuff i wouldn't tolerate at my home

You may remember Catalonia held an Independence referendum 2 years ago, lots of things have happened since then, I'm going to try to summarize, if you're interested in my initial reaction read my blog from that very same day.

On October 27 2017, following the referendum results, the Parliament of Catalonia declared Independence by a majority of 70 out of 135 MPs. That was mostly ignored by every single country in the world. A few hours later the Spanish government used bigger-army-diplomacy (AKA article 155 of Spanish Constitution) to decide that the Parliament of Catalonia would be suspended and new elections would happen in Catalonia on December 21.

On November 2nd 2017, a judge put most of the Catalan government in jail with the charges of "you've been terribly bad".

They still remain in jail awaiting for trial results (trial finished a few months ago).

Notable exceptions of government officials not in jail are president Carles Puigdemont and Ministers Clara Ponsatí and Toni Comín, that exiled themselves to other European countries. Spain has tried several times to get European countries to extradite them to Spain because "they've been terribly bad", but that has failed every single time, so they ended up revoking the extradition requests.

Elections happened on December 21 2017, and to shocking surprise of no one, almost virtually the same results happened if you count the pro-independence vs anti-independence blocks.

Since then the Catalan pro-independence government has been basically very low-key in their actions.

Meanwhile, Spain had a its own elections in April this year. They did this nice thing of letting the jailed (but still not sentenced to anything, so innocent) Catalan politicians run, and several of them won Congress seats. Then they said "oh but you know, you're a very dangerous person, so we're not going to let you attend Congress sessions". Not that it matters now, since Spain is unable to govern itself and is having it's 4th election in 4 years this November.

We also had elections in the European Union, and you know what? The same happened! They let catalan-jailed politicians run but then they decided they would not let them take the seats. Actually, this time is even worse since Carles Puigdemont and Toni Comín, that are living in Brussels without any extradition petition (i.e. they're basically free citizens of Europe), have also been rejected from taking their seats for some esoteric reason.

As a "fun fact", in late 2018 some Spanish regions had elections. Andalucia was one of them and the current government is a coalition of PP+C+VOX, i.e. right wing conservatives, right wing liberals and ultra right wing nut-jobs. One of their first decisions was to put away 100000 euros for grants to teach Spanish to Spanish born people (not for helping immigrants, they're right wing crazies after all) living in Catalonia that don't know how speak Spanish. I'm 99.99% sure the number of people that matches that description is very close to 0 people. You heard well, the poorest region of Spain decided to subsidize the 4th richest region for something that is virtually useless. Thanks!

Much less "fun fact", last week Monday, the Spanish police decided to detain 9 pro-independence people (later to be 7 since 2 were let go) with terrorism charges. The investigation is on-going and technically it should be secret, but we've seen pictures all over the news of what the cops say to be material to make bombs, and all i can see is a pressure cooking pot and some fireworks used typically for Ball de diables.

I don't want to 100% rule out this people having actual plans to do something nasty, but Spanish police/judges/state history of just fabricating charges against people they don't like is so long (An anarchist recently spent *18* months in jail awaiting trial for tweeting stuff "Goku lives, the fight continues" to be then just found innocent after trial) that i would not be surprised either if this is just Spain doing bigger-army-diplomacy again.

TL;DR: Everything is fucked up and I can't really see a way out at this point.

Akademy 2019

It's 10 days already since Akademy 2019 finished and I'm already missing it :/

Akademy is a week-long action-packed conference, talks, BoFs, daytrip, dinner with old and new friends, it's all a great combination and shows how amazing KDE (yes, the community, that's our name) is.

On the talks side i missed some that i wanted to attend because i had to extend my time at the registration booth helping fellow KDE people that had forgotten to register (yes, our setup could be a bit easier, doesn't help that you have to register for talks, for travel support and for the actual conference in three different places), but I am not complaining, you get to interact with lots of people in the registration desk, it's a good way to meet people you may not have met otherwise, so please make sure you volunteer next year ;)

One of the talks i want to highlight is Dan Vrátil's talk about C++, I agree with him that we could do much better in making our APIs more expressive using the power of "modern" C++ (when do we stop it calling modern?). It's a pity that the slides are not up so you'll have to live with Kévin Ottens sketch of it for now.



My talk was sadly not very well attended since i was sharing time with the more interesting talk by Marco and Bhushan about Plasma in embedded devices (i would have gone there if it wasn't because i had a talk) so if you're interested in fuzzing please read my slides and give me a shout if you want to volunteer to help us fuzz all the things!

On the BoFs side one of the hardest but most interesting we had was the one about KDE Applications (the N things we release monthly in one go) vs KDE applications (all applications made by us), and i think we may be on the right track there, there's a plan, needs finishing out, but I'm confident it may actually work :)

One of the things that shows how amazing this conference is and how many interesting things are happening is the fact that i made a small list of bugs i wanted to work on if i ever got bored of the talks or the BoFs, i don't think i even started on any of them ^_^

Akademy 2020

Akademy is a core event for KDE and we need to find people to help us organising it every year. If you think you can help, please have a look at the call for hosts document.

Thanks

I would like to thank the UnixMiB friends for hosting us, i know it's lots of work and i hope you know we all very much appreciate the effort you put in.

I would like to thank the Akademy-team on KDE's side too, you are amazing and pull out great work year after year, keep it up!

I would like to thank the KDE e.V. for partially sponsoring my attendance to Akademy, please donate to KDE if you think the work done at Akademy is important.

Order your Akademy t-shirt *NOW*

If you want an Akademy 2019 t-shirt you have until Monday 12th Aug at 1100CEST (i.e. in 2 days and a bit) to order it.

Head over to https://akademy.kde.org/2019/akademy-2019-t-shirt and get yourself one of the exclusive t-shirts with Jen's awesome design :)

My KDE Onboarding Sprint 2019 report

This week I took part on the KDE Onboarding Sprint 2019 (part of what's been known as Nuremberg Megasprint (i.e. KDEConnect+KWin+Onboarding) in, you guessed it, Nuremberg.

The goal of the sprint was "how do we make it easier for people to start contributing". We mostly focused on the "start contributing *code*" side, though we briefly touched artists and translators too.

This is *my* summary, a more official one will appear somewhere else, so don't get annoyed at me if the blog is a bit opinionated (though i'll try it not to)

The main issues we've identified when trying to contribute to KDE software is:
* Getting dependencies is [sometimes] hard
* Actually running the software is [sometimes] hard

Dependencies are hard

Say you want to build dolphin from the git master branch. For that (at the time of writing) you need KDE Frameworks 5.57, this means that if you run the latest Ubuntu or the latest OpenSUSE you can't build it because they ship older versions.

Our current answer for that is kdesrc-build but it's not the most easy to use script, and sometimes you may end up building QtWebEngine or QtWebKit, which as a newbie is something you most likely don't want to do.

Running is hard

Running the software you have just built (once you've passed the dependencies problem) is not trivial either.

Most of our software can't be run uninstalled (KDE Frameworks are a notable exception here, but newbies rarely start developing KDE Frameworks).

This means that you may try to run make install, which if you didn't pass -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX pointing somewhere in your home you'll probably have to run make install as root since it defaults to /usr/local (this will be fixed in next extra-cmake-modules release to point to a somewhat better prefix) that isn't that useful either since none of your software is looking for stuff in /usr/local. Newbies may be tempted to use -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr but that's *VERY* dangerous since it can easily mess up your own system.

For applications, our typical answer is use -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/home/something/else at cmake stage, run make install and then set the environment variables to pick up things from /home/something/else, a newbie will say "which variables" at this stage probably (and not newbies too, I don't think i remember them all). To help with that we generate a prefix.sh in the build dir and after the next extra-cmake-release we will tell the users that they need to run it for things to work.

But still that's quite convoluted and I know from experience answering people in IRC that lots of people get stuck there. It's also very IDE unfriendly since IDEs don't usually have the "install" concept, it's run & build for them.

Solutions

We ended up focusing on two possible solutions:

* Conan: Conan "the C/C++ Package Manager for Developers" (or so they say) is something like pip in the python world but for C/C++. The idea is that by using Conan to get the dependencies we will solve most of the problems in that area. Whether it can help or not with the running side is still unclear, but some of our people involved in the Conan effort think they may either be able to come up with a solution or get the Conan devs to help us with it. Note Conan is not my speciality by far, so this may not be totally correct.

* Flatpak: Flatpak is "a next-generation technology for building and distributing desktop applications on Linux" (or so they say). The benefits of using flatpak are multiple, but focusing on onboarding are. "Getting dependencies is solved", dependencies are either part of the flatpatk SDK and you have them or the flatpak manifest for the application says how to get and build them and that will automagically work for you as it works for everyone else using the same manifest. "Running is solved" because when you build a flatpak it gets built into a self contained artifact so running it is just running it, no installing or environment variable fiddling is needed. We also have [preliminary] support in KDevelop (or you can use Gnome Builder if you want a more flatpak-centric experience for now). The main problem we have with flatpak at this point is that most of our apps are not totally flatpak-ready (e.g. Okular can't print). But that's something we need to fix anyway so it shouldn't be counted as a problem (IMHO).

Summary

*Personally* i think Flatpak is the way to go here, but that means that collectively we need to say "Let's do it", it's something we all have to take into account and thus we have to streamline the manifest handling/updating, focus on fixing the Flatpak related issues that our software may have, etc.

Thanks

I would like to thank SUSE for hosting us in their offices and the KDE e.V. for sponsoring my attendance to the sprint, please donate to KDE if you think the work done at sprints is important.

KDE Applications 19.08 branches created

Make sure you commit anything you want to end up in the KDE Applications 19.08 release to them

We're already past the dependency freeze.

The Freeze and Beta is this Thursday 18 of July.

More interesting dates
August 1, 2019: KDE Applications 19.08 RC (19.07.90) Tagging and Release
August 8, 2019: KDE Applications 19.08 Tagging
August 15, 2019: KDE Applications 19.08 Release

https://community.kde.org/Schedules/Applications/19.08_Release_Schedule

Beware of some of the Qt 5.13 deprecation porting hints

QComboBox::currentIndexChanged(QString) used to have (i.e. in Qt 5.13.0) a deprecation warning that said "Use currentTextChanged() instead".

That has recently been reverted since both are not totally equivalent, sure, you can probably "port" from one to the other, but the "use" wording to me seems like a "this is the same" and they are not.

Another one of those is QPainter::initFrom, which inits a painter with the pen, background and font to the same as the given widget. This is deprecated, because it's probably wrong ("what is the pen of a widget?") but the deprecation warning says "Use begin(QPaintDevice*)" but again if you look at the implementation, they don't really do the same. Still need to find time to complain to the Qt developers and get it fixed.

Anyhow, as usual, when porting make sure you do a correct port and not just blind changes.