KDE dinner in Berlin - October 3

This weekend the KDE e.V. board is going to have an in-person board meeting in Berlin.

We would like you to join us for dinner on Saturday 3 around 19:00 (location still undecided, suggestions accepted).

If you are interested in talking about KDE, KDE e.V., Free Software, Open Source, today's elections in Catalonia or any other random talk and want to have a good time let me know that you're coming (latest by Wednesday night).

September 26: SystemSettings and KCMs bug triaging day!

Today/Tomorrow September 26 is SystemSettings and KCMs bug triaging day.

As described by Jeremy in this post in the KDE Gardening mailing list the purpose is:

1. Triage all bugs in the systemsettings product (and maybe the kcm product too).
2. If a bug is reproducible still, comment on it and find someone that knows how to fix it and convince them to do so.
3. Find maintainers for as many of the kcms as we can.

This is something anyone with a relatively new Plasma installed can help with so join us on September 26 at the #kde-devel IRC channel!

Personally I'll be on from 10am Spanish time until around 4pm with some lunch time in between.

More info at the gardening wiki for SystemSettings

Using git the proper way for correct release changelogs

If you look at kdenlive's changelog for KDE Applications 15.08 and for KDE Applications 15.04.3 you'll see that "Fix autosave not working when opening project file from command line or click in file browser" shows up in both.

On the other hand if you have a look at gwenview, in 15.04.3 it shows "Make saving thumbnails work again" while it's not part of 15.08.

Does that mean that this bug got lost?

No, gwenview is actually the correct thing, we should not mention a bug again for 15.08 if it was released in 15.04.3, since well it's been released already :D

So why does kdenlive, marble and others show commits in the two places?

Because their developers are not doing the proper git-thing of commiting to the oldest supported branch and then merging up to master, so for git it's two different commits instead of the same (in case of the kdenlive commit in question it'd be https://quickgit.kde.org/?p=kdenlive.git&a=commit&h=cc55a9cea5c2f029744f8aba79a362fd302ec0bb and https://quickgit.kde.org/?p=kdenlive.git&a=commit&h=28b3cc7b5141fcc2fed84433b9fe9851c35b7e08).

Commiting the fix to the oldest supported branch and then merging up has lots of other benefits (like making sure you never forget a fix in master), but maybe this is the one that finally convinces more devs to switch to it, nicer changelogs ;)

KDE Workspaces 4.11 End of Life this August

Back in August 2013 we promised to do Long Term Support for kde-workspace for 2 years.

This means this August is the last release for kde-workspace (coming with KDE Applications 15.08.0).

Of course, we can extend the releases if anyone has a strong reason.

If you do, head to the release-team mailing list!

rsibreak port to KF5 started!

I just started the port of rsibreak to KF5.

Contributions at http://quickgit.kde.org/?p=rsibreak.git

Akademy 2015 and Akademy-es 2015 recap

I'm back home after more than a week of talks and hacking in the beautiful city of A Coruña.

There I attended Akademy, the international conference of the KDE Community, and Akademy-es, it's Spanish counterpart.

First off I'd like to thank the local organization, GPUL, that as always has done an amazing job in hosting us, repeating the success of Guademy, Akademy-es 2008, KDE-EDu sprint, etc.

Also kudos to the Scottish-Kenny duo, top notch organizing work as always.

Finally thanks to the both Akademy and Akademy-es sponsors. Specially Qindel, that sponsored us for the first time, hope we can continue the relationship in the future.

The talks this year were specially interesting, I attended some good BoFs on releasing and translation infrastructure, hopefully some improvements coming your way soon :)

Of course not everything is perfect and my biggest pain point this year was that we did not have as much people in Akademy-es as we expected. Akademy-es happened the 2 days before Akademy and this meant that lots of local people from the organization team were helping set up the place instead of attending the talks; also on Friday some of us (I count at least 8) were attending the KDE e.V. General Assembly so couldn't attend Akademy-es either. Definitely something to think about and improve next time Akademy and Akademy-es happen at the same place.

But all in all pretty positive experience as always, nice to meet so many KDE people :)

KDE Applications 15.08 release schedule

We have just made official the release schedule for KDE Applications 15.08.

It's a bit simpler than in previous times, let's see if it works out.

Freeze is in 2 months

Full schedule at https://techbase.kde.org/Schedules/Applications/15.08_Release_Schedule

Help the KDE eV write a privacy policy for Piwik

We want to enable piwik to get meaningful statistics of kde.org visits, to be nice with privacy for that we have enabled the ip anonymizer plugin but we still need to provide a way for people to opt out.

More info at the todo.kde.org task (Use this link if you don't have a KDE identity account)

Dear Lazyweb: What to visit in Alaska?

I'm holidaying in Alaska for a few weeks around June, anyone has been there and can share the stuff we should totally not miss/do when visiting?

Akademy-es 2015 registration open

We have just opened the registration for Akademy-es 2015.

This year we are piggy-backing on the Akademy 2015 registration system since Akademy-es 2015 happens in the same place just 2 days before so we thought it made sense have a common registration for both.

More info at https://www.kde-espana.org/akademy-es2015/registro.php

See you at A Coruña!

Submit your talk to Akademy 2015!

The Call for Papers deadline for Akademy 2015 is just 10 days away. So you should submit a talk now, you know you have cool stuff to share, so do a small write up and tell the world that awesome new stuff you're working on.

And of course don't forget to register as always it's free but let's us know how many of you nice people are going to come over ;)

Ah and we also have the badges available, thanks to Alba Carro for the nice pictures :)

KDE dinner in Berlin - April 11

In a few weeks (April 11-12) the KDE e.V. board is going to have an in-person board meeting in Berlin.

We board people have to eat from time to time and since we like talking to other people besides ourselves we’re organizing a dinner on Saturday 11 around 19:00 (location still undecided, suggestions accepted).

So if you are interested in talking about KDE, KDE e.V., Free Software, Open Source, or any other random talk and want to have a good time let me know that you're coming as soon as possible, space is limited.

KRecipes Gardening Day: Saturday 21 February

It's clear the current KRecipes gardening effort is not having much traction, but before moving on to different applications, let's try a different format, the Gardening Day.

This Saturday 21 February we will meet at #kde-devel on freenode IRC from 9 UTC onwards (It'll probably go well into the UTC late-afternoon) to work on KRecipes.

There's three main topics:
* Triage and fix bugs
* Make tests pass in jenkins
* Port code away from Qt3Support/KDE3Support (without breaking stuff :D)

If we have some extra time we can try to work on some feature like using
KUnitConversion to convert between units.

You don't need to be an expert on KRecipes to help, so join us :)

KDE Applications 15.04 Feature Freeze is in 2 weeks

As per our Release Schedule, the freeze for KDE Applications 15.04 is in two weeks (25 February).

Get yourselves ready!

Qt 5.4 QML -> C++ QVariant issues

I usually don't blog about what I do in my day-time job in my personal blog but since this may affect some of the KDE/Qt developers I will do this time.

Qt 5.4 was released three months ago; at Canonical we're starting to move the Ubuntu Pĥone codebase to it now and it has an important behavior change as noted in it's changes file (that is quite hard to find by the way, it took me like 5 minutes to find, and that's knowing it existed, searching for "qt 5.4 changelog" does not return http://qt-project.org/wiki/Change-files-in-Qt-5.4.0 that is the important page) that has affected us in many places

The important behavior change is that now some QVariants will be passed to C++ as QJSValue-QVariants instead of QStringList-QVariants, QMap-QVariants, etc so if your code did things like checking the variant type now it will fail, so basically for any C++ function that receives QVariants from QML you need to add extra code to unbox the QVariant, i.e.

void MyClass::myFunction(QVariant v)
{
    // unbox the QVariant-QJSValue
    if (v.userType() == qMetaTypeId<QJSValue>()) {
        v = v.value<QJSValue>().toVariant();
    }
    // This is your old code that checks the type
    // of the QVariant is a valid one
    if (v.type() != QVariant::Map &&
        v.type() != QVariant::List &&
        v.type() != QVariant::StringList) {
        qWarning() << "Bad param" << v;
        return;
    }
    // From here your old code that does things
}

Disabling downloadable fonts

We have a nice new style for planet.kde.org. I think it is generally an improvement over what we had, but sadly it decides to force the oxygen font over my browser selected font.

If you're like me and can stand the oxygen font being forced over the font you chose on your configuration have a look at this article to see how to disable downloadable fonts.

Update: Unfortunately if you do that you'll lose the K-logo on the left because instead of an icon we're using a font to render it. So now I have to decide between unreadable (for me) oxygen font a having the broken K-logo on the top.

Help test KDE Bomber game

As Laurent mentioned we are moving some KDE games from kdelibs4-based to kf5-based for the next KDE Applications 15.04 relase.

Today we just switched libkdegames, libkmahjongg and bovo. Next target is bomber, so if you have some time grab the master branch of libkdegames and the frameworks one of bomber, give it a try and make sure we're not regressing somewhere we didn't realize.

GSoC student digikam sprint experience

Very refreshing to read about one of our GSoC students experience traveling for the first time to Europe for a KDE Sprint :)

And thanks to Tobias and The Qt Company for hosting the sprint in their Berlin offices :)

KDE End of Year 2014 Fundraiser is over

Yesterday was the last day of the KDE End of Year 2014 Fundraiser.

I want to thank publicly the 788 donors that helped us raise over 22000 euro.

You all rock and rule!

Thanks to this money we'll be able to keep sponsoring developers to attend conferences and sprints to improve the software we all love and use.

Of course there's never enough money so we still greatly appreciate your donations at http://kde.org/donate or even better you can become a KDE Supporting Member.

KDE Applications 15.04 Release Schedule

The schedule for KDE Applications 15.04 release is ready. As always it's available in techbase at https://techbase.kde.org/Schedules/Applications/15.04_Release_Schedule.

The Freeze is only six weeks away!