KDE/4.10 branched

KDE/4.10 branches have just been created for all the git repos (except for kdelibs that already had it) and SVN branches/KDE/4.10/ has been populated with the modules still in SVN

From now on, if you want something to end up in the 4.10 release you'll have to commit it to there (in addition to master for future releases)

Tomorrow 17 December 2012 at 23:59 UTC, the following freezes for 4.10 kick in

* Tagging Freeze for Release Candidate 1
Only compilation fixes for all platforms are allowed to be committed.
Everything else (even showstopper fixes) have to be run through reviewboard, with the release-team and the affected maintainers as reviewer.
Tagging will happen on December 18 at 23:59 UTC

* Hard API Freeze
The API is now frozen. No more changes to APIs or header files (except docs) after this date.

* Hard Message Freeze
You need to contact kde-i18n-doc for every single string change

* Artwork Freeze
All artwork is frozen on this date. No new artwork should be added. Existing artwork can continue to be tweaked and fixed.

* Bindings Freeze
No new additions to the language bindings, except optional bindings as permitting by the kde-bindings team.

* Documentation Freeze
No more changes to documentation or handbooks after this date.
For typos, spelling and simple grammar changes you have to mail kde-i18n-doc for approval.

If you have to update program version numbers, library abi numbers, bugzilla program version numbers or stuff like that, please do it as soon as possible.

http://techbase.kde.org/Schedules/KDE4/4.10_Release_Schedule

And this is why one needs cops

And then they drive like mad with their cars, and wonder what? They hit one of their own http://youtu.be/xr_lRr-4_5k?t=1m56s

Yes, I am aware that there are cops out there that do a good work, but sharing the work with these people should make them sad.

Okular tiled rendering merged to master

Okular tiled rendering (more info) has been merged into master and is scheduled to be released with 4.10 KDE Applications release. There are a few open issues that Mailson and Fabio are working like crazy to get fixed for the upcoming Beta 1 release this thursday. It would be great if you can give it a try anyway and report any issue you might find.

KDE Spanish forum in forums.kde.org

Since a few weeks you can find the KDE en Español sub-forum inside the always awesome KDE Community Forums. Go there if you have something to ask or share and you prefer communicating in Spanish.

10 years ago...

http://websvn.kde.org/?view=revision&revision=185057

Who would have thought I'd still be around?

4.10 dependency freeze in two weeks!

Copying from the 4.10 Release Schedule page

Thursday, November 1, 2012:
From this moment on it is not allowed to add new dependencies or bump dependencies versions. It is possible to get an exception for this. Post the patch to reviewboard and add the release-team as reviewer. We will check if the dependency is needed and is available on all platforms.

In other words: If you have a feature that requires a new dependency or a version of a dependency that is higher than currently checked for in the build system, you need to have committed this change before this date.

Active port of Okular merged

Marco just merged the Active port of Okular to the master in the okular repository. Now people that have the proper dependencies will also get an active-documentviewer binary that is a touch optimized experience based in the Okular core libraries.

You can find a video of an old version of it at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvLVqiFC6_4

ktouchpadenabler 0.1.1 released

What is ktouchpadenabler?

ktouchpadenabler is a kded daemon that listens to the XF86XK_TouchpadToggle/XF86XK_TouchpadOn/XF86XK_TouchpadOff key presses and toggles/enables/disables your touchpad accordingly.

What's the difference against 0.1.0?

The only difference is updated translations, the code is exactly the same. Thanks to the translation teams for their work :-)

You can find it at http://download.kde.org/stable/extragear/ktouchpadenabler-0.1.1.tar.bz2.

4.10 Soft Feature Freeze in 13 days!

Remember the 4.10 Soft Feature Freeze is in 13 days so try to get your features ready for merging as soon as possible. If you add your features to the Feature Plan you get two weeks more until Hard Feature Freeze, and if you don't need those two weeks you should add them anyway since it really helps other teams like promo, Q/A, etc. to have the features listed in one place.

Okular user forum

I've never been a fan of forums, but it seems our users like them so we've created the Okular subforum inside the awesome KDE Community Forums.

It shows that moving existing topics to the okular forum we already have 61 of them .D

Of course bugzilla is still the place for bugs and wishes and the mailing list is still the place for development, but if you have other user questions, don't hesitate to share them in the forums!

Okular tiled rendering manual

Mailson Lira has written a nice webpage explaining how his tiled rendering work for Okular works.

This is still not merged for 4.10 but we hope to get it ready by then.

And of course thanks to Google for his Google Summer of Code program that allowed Mailson to work on this project.

Randa 2012: First Half of Awesomeness

Time passes fast when you are enjoying the great company and the great location that the Randa 2012 meeting provides.

It's been a busy time for me in the Education part of the meeting.

I've worked on the following items:

kdeedu

Kalzium

- Fix uninitialized memory use
- Fix memory leak
- Make molecule downloading more user friendly
- Let kalzium open molecules both from command line and from clicking in the file manager
- Look and feel improvements to the calculator

Rocs

- Fix uninitialized memory use

Step

- Fix uninitialized memory use

Website

- Make it a bit more localization friendly (now we should not show images with text besides the KDE Edu logo)

kdegames

Thanks to Ben we now have kdegames on jenkins, which made me fix some bugs there :)

Killbots

- Make tests work without the game being installed

kmahjongg

- Fix compilation when libkmahjongg is not installed in default folders

kshisen

- Fix compilation when libkmahjongg is not installed in default folders

kdelibs

- Fix a bug with menubars when editing toolbars

l10n-kde4

- Regular tasks of moving files around

And of course this is just the things that resulted in commits, between the various random things I've helped people around with their questions that fall inside my area of expertise, for example helped Frederik Gladhorn integrate the KDE translation system on the Qt AT SPI project so we can provide an even more polished accessibility solution to our users and also "chaired" the KDE Edu discussions whose results you can find in the Notes links at http://community.kde.org/KDEEdu/Sprint2012

And finally to get some relax I've also contributed to the soluttion of the puzzle containing last year's group photo


And also got photographed for next years puzzle ;-)


Thanks all that donated to the pledgie and made Randa 2012 happen!

And now back to Awesomeness!

Trobadour knowledge about QImage

If you are using QImage::Format_RGB32 and the QImage constructor that takes uchar * data make sure your format is 0xffRRGGBB (i.e. the missing alpha channel is exactly 0xff) otherwise some operations won't work.

KDE SC 4.10 Release Schedule

KDE SC 4.10 Release Schedule has just been made official. If everything goes to plan (and we have been able to keep with schedules quite good lately) we should be enjoying new 4.10 goodness by late January 2013.

By the way, Soft Feature Freeze is in 7 weeks!

Got my Join The Game Welcome Pack :-)

http://jointhegame.kde.org/

The death of http://www.kde.org/announcements/changelogs/*.php

The KDE SC Release Team has decided to not use the http://www.kde.org/announcements/changelogs/*.php files generated from the changelog_branch_*.xml anymore.

If you want your bugfix to be linked from the announcement make sure it has the "Version Fixed In" correctly set so it appears in this query (and in the future replace 4.9.1 with the correct version ;-))

KDE Randa Meetings Pledgie

Lots of people meeting and shaping the future of KDE software. Help make it happen!

Copy&paste from the Pledgie site

For the fourth year, the intense sprints in Randa, Switzerland will include key KDE projects and top developers, all collaborating concurrently under one roof, isolated from noise and distractions.

Every previous Randa meeting has been concentrated and productive, generating exceptional results; organizers and participants expect the same and more this year. And the meetings have produced significant breakthroughs for KDE users and developers.

While the participants are unpaid volunteers, there are hard expenses like accommodation, food and travel to get the volunteer contributors to Randa. If you are not attending, you can still support the Randa meeting by making a donation. As in the past, the Randa meeting will benefit everyone who uses KDE software.

KDE 4.9 Releases Dinner in Barcelona

Awesome as always :-)

4.9.0 is out!

Yay! I'm so happy that we got it out of the door, 4.9.x is going to be amazing :-)

Personally I'd like to thank Fabio d'Urso for being my new Okular co-developer (actually he did more commits than me, but don't tell anyone) and implementing the store annotations to pdf files feature both in Okular and in poppler. Fabio you rock :-)

Dear Lazyweb: Who is right g++ or clang?

#include <stdio.h>

class A
{
    protected:
        static void foo()
        {
            printf("HI\n");
        }
};

class B : public A
{
    friend class C;
};

class C
{
    public:
        void useFoo()
        {
            A::foo();
        }
};

int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
    C c;
    c.useFoo();
}

g++ compiles, clang complains that A::foo is protected and can't be used in C::useFoo.I know friendship is not inherited, but this is actually the reverse of inheriting, so does anyone has any pointer as to where i should open the bug? clang or gcc?

Joined the KDE Game!

A few days ago I decided to go to http://jointhegame.kde.org/ and "Join the Game".

For those of you unfamiliar with the term it means i became an official supporting member of KDE eV by donating 25€ each 3 months.

In exchange i get this nice image

A membership card and a welcome gift (waiting for them, i just joined so still not here), the invitation to attend the annual general assembly of KDE e.V. (which doesn't mean much since i'm already a KDE e.V. member) and regular first hand reports about KDE's activities.

That's cool and it's what the webpage lists as benefits, but I think the other huge benefit I get is that KDE has a more stable source of income (it's better to have 100 people donating 100€/year that one donating 15000€, because that one might decide otherwise for next year and you take a big hit).

So if you like KDE and want us to keep doing development sprints, paying for the hardware, etc. you might want to Join The Game with me so we get a more stable source of income.

Of course you can also donate a single time via paypal (and other means) at http://kde.org/community/donations/ but I sincerely think being a member of Join The Game is great and after all it's just 0.28€ per day, of course we live in though economic times so only you can decide if you can afford to be part of this great club ;-)

4.9 Dinner in Barcelona (4th August)

Following our tradition, the KDE-ers of Barcelona (and anybody from anywhere that wants to drop by) will celebrate the release of 4.9 with a dinner. This time will be on 4th of August at 21:30 in the Hola Manito Restaurant in Gràcia.

Of course everyone is invited to come and remember that if it's too far for you, you can always organize something in your own city, according to the KDE users map there is people around with a common interest!

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.

Akademy-es 2012 - First day gone

So the first day of the Akademy-es 2012 is already gone.

My day started early in the morning in Barcelona getting train to go to Zaragoza. Got there in less than 2 hours. Nice :-)

After getting to the hotel we headed to the nice Seminario building where today's talks took place.

We started with the welcoming ceremony with the local autorities (City Council local free software companies association (CESLA)), followed by me doing a quick summary of all the talks that would follow in the whole conference.

After that, Paul Brown (of Linux Magazine Spain fame) did a great talk about the whys and how of some typical/silly questions we in the Free Software world get. This was my first time attending a Paul Brown talk and I have to say he is really a gifted speaker.

Then we recharged our energy with coffe and pastries and got prepared to listen Agustín explaining how KDE is great for companies and to Baltasar talk about Plasma Active, unfortunately I could not attend those last two talks since I was helping moving some stuff to the place where tomorrow talks will take place, but I'm sure they were awesome :-)

You can find some photos in Alex Fiestas' twitter, http://yfrog.com/kedhqjhj, http://yfrog.com/odsc5kkaj, http://t.co/euiscuzi, http://yfrog.com/ntnmmrnj, and of course you can watch the #akademyes hashtag.

ktouchpadenabler 0.1.0 released

What is ktouchpadenabler?
ktouchpadenabler is a kded daemon that listens to the XF86XK_TouchpadToggle/XF86XK_TouchpadOn/XF86XK_TouchpadOff key presses and toggles/enables/disables your touchpad accordingly.

You can find it at http://download.kde.org/stable/extragear/ktouchpadenabler-0.1.0.tar.bz2

Okular behaviour on Left/Right Arrow Key

Another question about what you, the okular users, think of a new feature proposed and implemented by Thomas Etter.

Please comment in the forum and not here since it makes it much easier to keep track of all the opinions!

Akademy-es 2012 it's here!

It is the time of the year of Akademy-es, the yearly KDE users and developers spanish meeting, if you were wondering were are the news, stop wondering! It's here ;-)



The Akademy-es 2012 will take place in the nice city of Zaragoza from 18th to 20th of May

Registration is open and the schedule is almost final and of course a big thanks to our hosts and sponsors.

See you in Zaragoza!

Reminder: KDE 4.9 is at the corner!

May 3: KDE 4.9 Soft Feature Freeze
May 17: KDE 4.9 Hard Feature Freeze
May 24: KDE 4.9 Beta 1 Tagging

Which means 1 month to Hard Feature Freeze.

Okular word selection on double click

I've just commited a change that implements a wish created 3 years ago "Double click to select words".

Another little nice feature for Okular :-)

It felt good doing some actual coding instead of being the code review monkey I am these days in the KDE/poppler worlds.

/me goes back to the boringness of reviewing other people's code :-/

Okular: Multiple bookmarks per page

Following the series of "We don't kwow what to do so we are going to ask you", we present you "Improvement on Okular bookmarks: How to handle more than one bookmark per page".

Please head over http://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=100729 and give mailson your opinion!

KDE SC 4.9 Release Schedule

KDE SC 4.9 Release Schedule has just been made official. If everything goes to plan (and we have been able to keep with schedules quite good lately) we should be enjoying new 4.9 goodness by early August 2012. Remember you can keep up to date with releases using the http://www.kde.org/releaseschedule.ics calendar file.

Okular users we want your input!

Sometimes the decision of how a program should behave is not right or wrong technically but based on the user expectation.

In Okular we are asking ourselves what should happen when you have two lines with the following text

This is an ex-
ample

and copy it. Should it return "This is an ex-\nample" or "This is an ex-ample" or "This is an example"?

Head over to the KDE forums and vote!

Okular now with hyphen aware search

Thanks to Mahfuzur Rahman Mamun (of column text selection GSoC fame) we can now search for words that have hyphens to split them between lines.

This is a new feature so it'll be only available with KDE 4.9.0

Okular 0.14 released!

KDE 4.8 just got released and that means Okular 0.14 also got released!

First of all I'd like to thank everyone that has done a git commit in the KDE 4.7 → KDE 4.8 trip, here the list in alphabetical order: Aaron Seigo, Aleix Pol, Christopher Reichert, Dario Freddi, David Faure, David Palacio, Elvis Stansvik, Frederik Schwarzer, Geoffry Song, Jiri Baum, Kevin Kofler, Martin Ueding, Michal Svec, Michel Ludwig, Mohammad Mahfuzur Rahman Mamun, Montel Laurent, Niels Ole Salscheider, Patrick von Reth, Philip Muskovac, Pino Toscano, Ralf Habacker, Stephen Anthony, Yuri Chornoivan.

That's more than 20 people! Awesome :-)

This release introduces new features like improved text selection in documents with columns, table selection tool, LaTex rendering in annotations, improved embedded support (for use in e.g. Kile), better layouting for facing pages, smarter screensaver/powermanagement handling, improved page label support, default zoom configuration, improved Landscape printing, etc.

You can find a non complete list of bugs and features in bugzilla.

And best of all there's already new features in the pipeline for the next release :-)

Let's keep the ball rolling!

Come Dine with Me and KDE 4.8

KDE is releasing 4.8 the 25th of January (if all goes well) and to celebrate that KDE España is organizing two dinners, one in Madrid the 20th of January and another one in Barcelona the 27th of January. Coincidentally i happen to be on both cities on the dates the dinners happen so if you are around come and chat with other KDE people! More info at http://www.kde-espana.es/news.php#itemCenasKDE48

My top 10 blog posts of 2011

Top 10 blog entries with more visits in 2011 in my blog:
10 - Poppler 0.18.0 released
    Poppler's latest major release gets the last spot on the list, PDF greatness for all!

9 - Okular and Send by Mail
    Interesting discussion of where does a feature belong. Outcome: kparts will get plasma share-like-connect awareness and you'll be able to share (including sending by mail) stuff from there :-)

8 - Poppler for windows
    Poppler for windows, a classic in my top lists since I wrote that blog originally in 2006!

7 - My CPU fan does not speedup
    When the CPU melted i discovered why, there was too much dust in the fan... :-/

6 - Blinken: First KDE App on the Nokia Store?
    KDE starts conquering the N9 application space, KAlgebra followed soon

5 - XPS viewer for Linux
    Microsoft seems to be succeeding in forcing XPS down people's throat, i did not expect linux users to have a need for XPS viewing

4 - keyboard crazyness
    Somehow Google loves this blogpost and sends people searching for keyboard to it

3 - KDE SC 4.8 Release Schedule
    People wants to know when new awesomeness will be out. Answer: soon!

2 - N9 disappointment
    Wonder if people reaching this page understand my disappointment, the N9 is an awesome phone, it just it doesn't meet my free software expectations

1 - Beware of KDE 4.6.4
    We had a small slip when packaging KDE 4.6.4, people wanted to know about it