Friday, November 09, 2018

KDE Applications 18.12 branches created

Make sure you commit anything you want to end up in the 18.12 release to them

We're already past the dependency freeze.

The Freeze and Beta is this Thursday 15 of November.

More interesting dates
November 29: KDE Applications 18.12 RC (18.11.90) Tagging and Release
December 6: KDE Applications 18.12 Tagging
December 13: KDE Applications 18.12 Release

https://community.kde.org/Schedules/Applications/18.12_Release_Schedule

Wednesday, October 24, 2018

Monday, September 24, 2018

Libre Application Summit 2018

Earlier this month i attended Libre Application Summit 2018 in Denver.



Libre Application Summit wants to be a place for all people involved in doing Free Software applications to meet and share ideas, though being almost organized by GNOME it had a some skew towards GNOME/flatpak. There was a good presence of KDE, but personally I felt that we would have needed more people at least from LibreOffice, Firefox and someone from the Ubuntu/Canonical/Snap field (don't get annoyed at you if I failed to mention your group).

The Summit was kicked off by a motivational talk on how to make sure we ride the wave of "Open Source has won but people don't know it". I felt the content of the talk was nice but the speaker was hit by some issues (not being able to have the laptop in front of her due to the venue being a bit weirdly layouted) that sadly made her speech a bit too stumbly.

Then we had a bunch of flatpak related talks, ranging from the new freedesktop-sdk runtime, from very technical stuff about how ostree works and also including a talk by our own Aleix Pol on how KDE is planning to approach the release of flatpaks. Some of us ended the day having BBQ at the house the Codethink people were staying. Thanks for the good time!



I kicked off the next day talking about how we (lately mostly Christoph) are doing the KDE Applications releases. We got appreciation of the good work we're doing and some interesting follow up questions so I think people were engaged by it.

The morning continued with talks about how to engage the "non typical" free software people, designers, students, professors, etc.



After lunch we had a few talks by the Elementary people and another talk with Aleix focused on which apps will run on your Plasma devices (hint: all of them).

The day finished with a quizz sponsored by System 76, it was fun!



The last day of talks started again with me speaking, this time about how amazing Qt is and why you should use it to build your apps. There I had some questions about people worrying if QtWidgets was going to die, I told them not to worry, but it's clear The Qt Company needs to improve their messaging in that regard.



After that we had a talk about a Fedora project to create a distro based exclusively in flaptaks, which sounds really interesting. The last talks of LAS 2018 were about how to fight vandalism in crowdsourced data, the status of Librem 5 (it's still a bit far away) and a very interesting one about the status of Free Software in Research.

All in all i think the conference was interesting, still a bit small and too GNOME controlled to appeal to the general crowd, but it's the second time it has been organized, so it will improve.

I want to thank the KDE e.V. for sponsoring my flight and hosting to attend this conference. Please Donate! so we can continue attending conferences like this and spreading the good work of KDE :)

Monday, September 03, 2018

Come meet KDE in Denver - September 6-9

This week, Aleix (KDE eV Vice Predisdent), Albert Vaca (KDE Connect maintainer) and me will be in Denver to attend the Libre Application Summit 2018.

Libre Application Summit is unfortunately not free to attend so even if i'd urge you to come and see the amazing talks we're going to give I can see why not everyone would want to come.

So I'm going to say that if you're in the Denver area and are a KDE fan, write a comment here and maybe we can meet for drinks or something :)

Thursday, August 09, 2018

PSA: Use SASL in konversation

You probably have seen that Freenode has been getting lots of spam lately.

To protect against that some channels have activated a flag that only allows authenticated users to enter the channel.

If you're using the regular "nickserv" authentication way as I was doing, the authentication happens in parallel to entering the channels and you'll probably be rejected from joining some.

What you want is use SASL, that is a "new IRC" protocol that will first authenticate and then join the server/channels.

More info at https://userbase.kde.org/Konversation/Configuring_SASL_authentication.

Thanks Fuchs on #kde-devel for enlightening me :)

And of course, I'm going to Akademy ;)

Monday, July 16, 2018

KDE Applications 18.08 branches created

Make sure you commit anything you want to end up in the KDE Applications 18.08 release to them :)

We're already past the dependency freeze.

The Freeze and Beta is this Thursday 19 of July.

More interesting dates
August 2: KDE Applications 18.08 RC (18.07.90) Tagging and Release
August 9: KDE Applications 18.08 Tagging
August 16: KDE Applications 18.08 Release

https://community.kde.org/Schedules/Applications/18.08_Release_Schedule

Thursday, June 21, 2018

Qt Contributor Summit 2018

About two weeks ago i attended Qt Contributor Summit 2018, i did so wearing my KDAB hat, but given that KDE software is based heavily on Qt I think I'll give a quick summary of the most important topic that was handled at the Summit: Qt 6

  • Qt 6 is planned for a November 2020 release
  • Qt 5 releases will continue with the current cadence as of now with 5.15 being the last release (and also LTS)
  • The work branch for Qt 6 will be branched soon after Qt 5.12
  • Qt 6 has to be easy to migrate from Qt 5
  • Qt 6 will use C++17
  • Everything to be removed in Qt 6 should be marked as deprecated in 5.15 (ideally sooner)
  • What can be done in Qt 5 should be done to Qt 5
  • Qt 6 should be a "boring" release user feature wise, mostly cleanup and preparing for the future
  • Qt 6 should change things that break at compile time, those are easy to fix, silent runtime changes are scarier
  • Qt 6 will not use qmake as build system
  • The build system for Qt 6 is still not decided, but there's people working on a qbs build and noone working on any other alternative

On a community related note, Tero Kojo the Community Manager for The Qt Company is leaving and doesn't seem a replacement is on sight

Of course, note that these are all plans, and as such they may be outdated already since the last 10 days :D

Wednesday, June 06, 2018

Call for distros: Patch cups for better internationalization

If you're reading this and use cups to print (almost certainly you do if you're on Linux), you may want to contact your distribution and ask them to add this patch.

It adds translation support for a few keyword found in some printers PPD files. The CUPS upstream project has rejected with not much reason other than "PPD is old", without really taking into account it's really the only way you can get access to some advanced printer features (see comments in the same thread)

Anyhow they're free to not want that code upstream but i really think all distros should add it since it's very simple and improves the usability for some users.

Friday, April 13, 2018

Akademy 2018 hotel and flight booked!

I just booked my flights and hotel for Akademy 2018.

If you're planning to come you should too! [1]

You can find information about the recommended accommodation here.

See you in Viena!

[1] unless you're applying for sponsored travel+accommodation

Monday, March 19, 2018

KDE Applications 18.04 branches created

Make sure you commit anything you want to end up in the KDE Applications 18.04 release to them :)

We're already past the dependency freeze.

The Freeze and Beta is this Thursday 22 of March.

More interesting dates
April 5: KDE Applications 18.04 RC (18.03.90) Tagging and Release
April 12: KDE Applications 18.04 Tagging
April 19: KDE Applications 18.04 Release

https://community.kde.org/Schedules/Applications/18.04_Release_Schedule

Akademy-es 2018 in Valencia - 11-13 May

This years Akademy-es will be happening in Valencia from 11 to 13 of May. The call for papers is still open so if speak Spanish and have something interesting to share with your fellow KDE people send a talk :)

We'll open registration shortly, be sure to attend and say hi!

Friday, February 23, 2018

Okular gains some more JavaScript support

Andre Heinecke did some patches [1][2][3][4][5] over the last few weeks that finally got landed this week.

With it we support recalculation of some fields based on others. An example that calculates sum, average, product, minimum and maximum of three numbers can be found in this youtube video.



This code will be available for the Okular version that will ship with KDE Applications 18.04

Wednesday, February 07, 2018