Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit 2023

This past weekend I attended the Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit 2023 as part of the KDE delegation.

 

 

I have been a mentor for GSOC almost every year since 2005 but this was my first time attending the mentor summit.

 

There were sessions about the typical things you'd expect: how to get more diverse folks as students, how to make sure we onboard them correctly, sustainability, funding, etc. All in all nothing groundbreaking and sadly no genius solution for the issues we face was given, but to a certain degree it helps to see that most of us have similar problems and it's not that we're doing things particularly wrong, it's just that running a Free Software project is though.

Carl Schwan and me ran a Desktop Linux session together with Jonathan Blandford of GNOME (check his Crosswords game, seems pretty nice) and basically asked folks "How happy are you with the Desktop Linux", you can find the notes about it at https://collaborate.kde.org/s/HKn6BoNCRNezn3K Nothing we don't know about really, Wayland and flatpak/snap are still a bit painful for some folks even if there's a general agreement they are good ideas.

I also organized a little session for all the attendees from Barcelona (it was about 6 of us or so) to sell them talk about Barcelona Free Software

One thing that always pops up in your mind when going to events is "How useful was it for me to attend this" since traveling to California from Europe is not easy, it is not cheap and it means investing quite some time (which in my case included taking vacation from work). 

 

Honestly, I think it's quite useful and we should attend more similar events. We get to know key people from other projects and we make sure other projects know about us. One of the most funny interactions was me sitting in a table, someone joining and saying "Woah KDE, you guys are super famous, love your work" and literally seconds after another person joining us and saying "Uh, KDE what is that?"

 

There's not much pictures because Google forbids taking pictures inside their buildings, the few exceptions include the chocolate table, it's quite a large quantity of chocolate we got to try, thanks Robert from Musicbrainz for pushing people to bring it :)

I'd like to thank Google and KDE e.V. for sponsoring my trip to the Summit, please donate at https://kde.org/fundraisers/plasma6member/

KDE February Mega Release schedule (the thing with Qt6 on it)

The next release for the big three in KDE land (KDE Frameworks, KDE Plasma and KDE Gear) is going to happen at the same time.

This is because we are switching to Qt6[*] and it helps if we can release all the products  at the same time.

If you want to help us with the effort, make sure to donate at https://kde.org/fundraisers/plasma6member/

The agreed schedule is:

8 November 2023: Alpha

KDE Gear 24.01.75 / KDE Plasma 5.80.0 / KDE Frameworks 5.245.0

29 November 2023: Beta 1

KDE Gear 24.01.80 / KDE Plasma 5.90.0 / KDE Frameworks 5.246.0

20 December 2023: Beta 2

KDE Gear 24.01.85 / KDE Plasma 5.91.0 / KDE Frameworks 5.247.0

10 January 2024: Release Candidate 1

KDE Gear 24.01.90 / KDE Plasma 5.92.0 / KDE Frameworks 5.248.0

For KDE Gear that want to ship with Qt6 for this release they need to be switched to Qt6 (and obviously stable) *BEFORE* this date.

31 January 2024: Release Candidate 2

KDE Gear 24.01.95 / KDE Plasma 5.93.0 / KDE Frameworks 5.249.0

21 February 2024: Private Tarball Release

KDE Gear 24.02.0 / KDE Plasma 6.0 / KDE Frameworks 6.0

28 February 2024: Public Release

KDE Gear 24.02.0 / KDE Plasma 6.0 / KDE Frameworks 6.0 

 

You can see that Alpha is less than 3 weeks away! Interesting times ahead!

 

[*]  some KDE Gear apps may remain in Qt5 if we have not had time to port them

Am I using qmllint wrong? Or is it still not there?

Today I was doing some experiments with qmllint hoping it would help us make QML code more robust.

I created a very simple test which is basically a single QML file that creates an instance of an object I've created from C++.

But when running qmllint via the all_qmllint  target it tells me

Warning: Main.qml:14:9: No type found for property "model". This may be due to a missing import statement or incomplete qmltypes files. [missing-type]
        model: null
        ^^^^^
Warning: Main.qml:14:16: Cannot assign literal of type null to QAbstractItemModel [incompatible-type]
        model: null
               ^^^^

Which is a relatively confusing error, since it first says that it doesn't know what the model property is, but then says "the model property is an QAbstractItemModel and you can't assign null to it"

Here the full code https://bugreports.qt.io/secure/attachment/146411/untitled1.zip in case you want to fully reproduce but first some samples of what i think it's important

QML FILE

import QtQuick
import QtQuick.Window

import untitled1 // This is the name of my import

Window {
    // things     

    ObjectWithModel {
        model: null
    }
}
 

HEADER FILE (there's nothing interesting in the cpp file)

#pragma once

#include <QtQmlIntegration>
#include <QAbstractItemModel>
#include <QObject>

class ObjectWithModel : public QObject {
    Q_OBJECT
    QML_ELEMENT  
  
    Q_PROPERTY(QAbstractItemModel* model READ model WRITE setModel NOTIFY modelChanged)

public:
    explicit ObjectWithModel(QObject* parent = nullptr);  

    AbstractItemModel* model() const;
    void setModel(QAbstractItemModel* model);

signals:
    void modelChanged();

private:
    QAbstractItemModel* mModel  = nullptr;
};

CMAKE FILE

cmake_minimum_required(VERSION 3.16)
project(untitled1 VERSION 0.1 LANGUAGES CXX)
set(CMAKE_CXX_STANDARD_REQUIRED ON)
find_package(Qt6 6.4 REQUIRED COMPONENTS Quick)
qt_standard_project_setup()

qt_add_executable(appuntitled1 main.cpp)

qt_add_qml_module(appuntitled1
    URI untitled1 VERSION 1.0
    QML_FILES Main.qml
    SOURCES ObjectWithModel.h ObjectWithModel.cpp
)

target_link_libraries(appuntitled1 PRIVATE Qt6::Quick)  

As you can see it's quite simple and, as far as I know, using the recommended way of setting up a QML module when using a standalone app.

 

But maybe I am holding it wrong?

KDE Gear 23.08 branches created

Make sure you commit anything you want to end up in the KDE Gear 23.08 releases to them

Dependency freeze is next July 20

The Feature Freeze and Beta is Thursday 27 of July.

More interesting dates  
  August 10: 23.08 RC (23.07.90) Tagging and Release
  August 17: 23.08 Tagging
  August 24: 23.08 Release

https://community.kde.org/Schedules/KDE_Gear_23.08_Schedule

KDE Gear 23.08 release schedule

This is the release schedule the release team agreed on

  https://community.kde.org/Schedules/KDE_Gear_23.08_Schedule

Dependency freeze is in less than 4 weeks (July 20) and feature freeze one
after that. Get your stuff ready!
 

The KDE Qt5 Patch Collection has been rebased on top of Qt 5.15.9

 

Commit: https://invent.kde.org/qt/qt/qt5/-/commit/4c0d35b0991216766ca301de205599d1daa72057

Commercial release announcement: https://www.qt.io/blog/commercial-lts-qt-5.15.9-released

OpenSource release announcement: https://lists.qt-project.org/pipermail/announce/2023-April/000406.html

 

As usual I want to personally extend my gratitude to the Commercial users of Qt for beta testing Qt 5.15.9 for the rest of us.

 

The Commercial Qt 5.15.9 release introduced one bug that have later been fixed. Thanks to that, our Patchset Collection has been able to incorporate the fix for the issue [1] and the Free Software users will never be affected by it! 

 

P.S: Special shout-out to Andreas Sturmlechner for identifying the fix of the issue, since I usually only pay attention to "Revert XYZ" commits and this one is not a revert but subsequent improvement

KDE Gear 23.04 branches created

Make sure you commit anything you want to end up in the KDE Gear 23.04 releases to them

We're already past the dependency freeze.

The Feature Freeze and Beta is next week Thursday 16 of March.

More interesting dates  
  March 30: 23.04 RC (23.03.90) Tagging and Release
  April 13: 23.04 Tagging
  April 20: 23.04 Release

https://community.kde.org/Schedules/KDE_Gear_23.04_Schedule

Send you talks for Akademy 2023 *now*!

Call for proposal ends Thursday the 30th of March

There's still a few weeks, but time is really running out.

 

I'm sure there's lots of interesting things you have to talk about Qt, KDE, C++, Community Management or other million things so head over to https://akademy.kde.org/2023/cfp/ or over to https://conf.kde.org/event/5/abstracts/ if you want to skip the nicely worded page that encourages you to submit a talk :)

Send you talks for Linux App Summit 2023 *now*!

Call for proposal ends this Saturday 18th of February.

 

I'm sure there's lots of interesting things you have to talk about so head over to https://linuxappsummit.org/cfp/ and press the "Submit your talk" button :)

The KDE Qt5 Patch Collection has been rebased on top of Qt 5.15.8

Commit: https://invent.kde.org/qt/qt/qt5/-/commit/281044e2541c842f8d0b0bc1a199999bf9d9951c

Commercial release announcement: https://www.qt.io/blog/commercial-lts-qt-5.15.8-released

OpenSource release announcement: https://lists.qt-project.org/pipermail/announce/2023-January/000388.html

 

As usual I want to personally extend my gratitude to the Commercial users of Qt for beta testing Qt 5.15.8 for the rest of us.

 

The Commercial Qt 5.15.8 release introduced two bugs that have later been fixed. Thanks to that, our Patchset Collection has been able to incorporate the the fix for one of the issues [1] and revert for the other [2]  and the Free Software users will never be affected by it! 

 

P.S: Special shout-out to Andreas Sturmlechner for identifying the fix of the issue, since I usually only pay attention to "Revert XYZ" commits and this one is not a revert but subsequent improvement