Submit your talks now for Akademy 2021!

As you can see in https://akademy.kde.org/2021/cfp the Call for Participation for Akademy 2021 (that will take place online from Friday the 18th to Friday the 25th of June) is already open.

 

You have until Sunday the 2nd of May 2021 23:59 UTC to submit your proposals but you will make our (talks committee) live much easier if you start sending the proposals *now* and not send them all last minute in 2 weeks ;)

I promise i'll buy you a $preferred_beverage$ for next years Akademy (which we're hoping will happen live) if you send a talk before end of this week (and you send me a mail about it)

KDE Gear 21.04 releases branches created

 Make sure you commit anything you want to end up in the 21.04 releases to them

We're already past the dependency freeze.

The Feature Freeze and Beta is this Thursday 18 of March.

More interesting dates
   April  8: 21.04 RC (21.03.90) Tagging and Release
   April 15: 21.04 Tagging
   April 22: 21.04 Release

https://community.kde.org/Schedules/KDE_Gear_21.04_Schedule

Okular: Should continuous view be an okular setting or a document setting?

In Okular:

 

Some settings are okular wide, if you change them, they will be changed in all the future okular instances, an easy example is if you change the shortcut for saving from Ctrl+S to Ctrl+Shift+E. 

 

Some other settings are document specific, for example zoom, if you change the zoom of a document it will only be restored when opening the same document again, but not if you open a different one. There's also a "default zoom value for documents you've never opened before" in the settings.

Some other settings like "Continuous View" are a bit of a mess and are both. "Continuous View" wants to be a global setting (i.e. so that if you hate continuous view you always get a non continous view) but it is also restored to the status it had when you closed the document you're just opening.

That's understandably a bit confusing for users :D

My suggestion for continuous view would be to make it work like Zoom, be purely document specific but also have a default option in the settings dialog for people that hate continous view.

 

I'm guessing this should cover all our bases?

 

Opinions? Anything i may have missed?

21.04 releases schedule finalized

It is available at the usual place https://community.kde.org/Schedules/release_service/21.04_Release_Schedule

Dependency freeze is in five weeks (March 11) and Feature Freeze a week after that, make sure you start finishing your stuff!

AVIF support for KImageFormats just landed

Thanks to Daniel Novomeský we will have support for AVIF images in KImageFormats starting in the next release.

We have (and by we I mean him) also added the avif code to be fuzzed under oss-fuzz so we'll be helping the upstream libavif/libaom to find potential memory issues in their code.

https://invent.kde.org/frameworks/kimageformats/-/merge_requests/8

https://github.com/google/oss-fuzz/pull/4850

CMake: Use new style imported targets to link libraries

 What does that mean?

It means this https://invent.kde.org/graphics/okular/-/commit/3129b642f996589f1c7fcee513741e1993924241

That is, you add JPEG::JPEG to target_link_libraries, and that's it, no need to add the includes, the compile_definitions and whatnot.

 

This has multiple advantages to the old mode:

• You can't misspell it, since these are actual things cmake knows about not strings so if you write something like JPEG::JPG it will fail at cmake stage
  
• You won't forget to add the include (most of us did at some point) because you don't need to :)
• The include path is just for that particular target (the old method added it to "everyone")
• It's basically less lines so it's harder to do wrong

 

To know if you can use that you'll need to use the cmake help, for example the imported target is described at https://cmake.org/cmake/help/latest/module/FindJPEG.html

Now we don't probably depend on cmake 3.19, do we? So we need to make sure the cmake we say we support has that, so use the combo on the top of that page to go and find which version introduced it, for JPEG we can see it was cmake 3.12

Planned obsolence for Android phones

Four years ago I bought a OnePlus 2 for 319€, nowdays it still is good hardware, it's better or as good as most of the mid to low end phones in the market.

 

But it has a big-ish problem, it is stuck on Android 6, which not only is old and probably full of security holes, it is starting to not be supported by some apps.

Solution: LineageOS.

It provides Android 10 for my phone and works flawlessly (from what i can see, only been using it for 4 days), so the fact that "some randos" (with all my love, I'm a rando) can make it work, means that the manufacturer could have if they wanted, they just chose not to.

It's really sad because if i wasn't a geek that knew how to put LineageOS on the device i would have probably ended up buying a new phone, making the world be fill with more junk.

Let's hope the more open devices like the PinePhone KDE Community Edition put an end to this :)

20.12 releases branches created

Make sure you commit anything you want to end up in the 20.12 releases to them

We're already past the dependency freeze.

The Feature Freeze and Beta is this Thursday 12 of November.

More interesting dates

November 26, 2020: 20.12 RC (20.11.90) Tagging and Release

December 3, 2020: 20.12 Tagging

December 10, 2020: 20.12 Release

https://community.kde.org/Schedules/release_service/20.12_Release_Schedule

Cheers,

Albert