Your chance to help #2: Improving bugzilla for old developers

A while ago our amazing sysadmins upgraded our bugzilla installation from something aging to something more modern. Hurrah! We are not a billion years behind in another software! Hurrah!

Unfortunately this meant we lost some of our ¿custom? code that allowed to show the Votes column in searches like this (click on the change columns link at the end).

One can still see the votes in a particular bug, but for things like wishes it was very useful to be able of sorting by votes.

So it would be extremely cool if you can try to implement this, be warned, it's probably not going to be easy to implement and moreover bugzilla is in perl, but i'll owe you a few beers if you make it :-)

If you want to help do not hesitate to contact me on aacid@kde.org and I'll forward you to the appropriate people, or even better just join the #kde-sysadmin channel in irc.freenode.net and present yourself as volunteer to do this job.

Your chance to help: Improving bugzilla for new developers

The other day I was talking with Fabio, a new Okular developer (a blog post on his awesomeness coming soon), and realized that he had permission to commit to the git repositories but not permission to close bugs in bugs.kde.org

This disconnect comes from the fact that bugzilla is not tied to your identity.kde.org user.

After speaking with the KDE sysadmins we agreed it'd be cool to enable permissions in bugzilla if there is a matching address (it would be cooler to match the accounts, but that's probably a gigantic task)

So we are looking for someone that can write some sql to do this:

1) find the user_id from someone's email address
2) insert an entry into user_group_map for the editbugs group and that user_id
3) insert an entry into user_group_map for the canconfirm group and that user_id

Additionally the code has to be smart enough to
1) print a notice if no bugzilla account was not found for the given email address
2) be written in a way as to not cause issues if the user already has those rights

The script can written in which ever language you prefer (though we expect some sanity in the choices if possible ;-))

If you want to help (and you know you want) do not hesitate to contact me on aacid@kde.org and I'll forward you to the appropriate people or even better just join the #kde-sysadmin channel in irc.freenode.net and present yourself as volunteer to do this job.

KDE/4.9 branch created

KDE/4.9 branch created.
Do not forget to push your fixes there too
Do not forget from tonight we have a freeze until RC1 is out
EOF

Qt Contributor Summit 2012

So here I am sitting on the lounge of the Qt Contributor Summit listening to jlayt-highschool-time music and doing two simple qtbase patches. I have to say that it's been a nice two days of technical discussion, here my highlights:
 * RIM are shipping full Qt libraries for BlackBerry 10 and next unreleased/unannunced QNX release
 * At last it is clear that QML Components are a pressing need and there were like 4 different talks/bofs/panels about it
 * There's lots of random huge companies using Qt, from HP in plotters to Scania on cranes, so the future is bright :-)
* People at Nokia/Qt are worried about their future but no one really knows anything set on stone so all you get is fear cropping up
And now some pictures
https://twitter.com/tsdgeos/status/215727012717924352/photo/1
https://twitter.com/tsdgeos/status/216176177910530050/photo/1
https://twitter.com/tsdgeos/status/216176177910530050/photo/1

Free Software - Free to pay

A few months ago a professor from the math department of FU Berlin filed a few bugs to poppler and Okular about video playing not being totally implemented/bug free.

After a few mail exchanges it became clear that given the always scarce resources in free software projects his bugs would not be fixed/implemented in a timely way since the poppler/Okular priorities and his' did not align.

Then the unexpected occurred, instead of complaining or giving up, he said "Well, i have a little money around" and I promptly suggested a few third party companies/individuals that would be interested in doing paid development and voilà! some time after, those features were developed

One of the often overlooked features of Free Software is the non existent vendor lock-in, in the non-free software world, if the company creating the software you use thinks your feature is nice to have but not important enough to develop, you are out of luck, it'll never happen, in the Free Software world you can have someone else develop it for you and get it merged upstream relatively easily.