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!

KDE l10n essential requirements changed

In the past we asked KDE translation teams to translate kdebase at least a 75% if they wanted to be part of a KDE release. With the evolution of KDE towards something less monolithic it made less and less sense to have that requirement, so today, going along with the split of the old kdebase directory of translations to kde-runtime, kde-workspace and kde-baseapps we have changed the requirement to be a 90% of kde-runtime.

It is a increase in percentage, but it is really a decrease of total messages required since previously 75% of kdebase was around 13000 messages and 90% of kde-runtime is around 3000.

You can check the essential requirements for what will be KDE 4.8 at http://l10n.kde.org/stats/gui/trunk-kde4/essential/

RFC: i18n extraction of desktop-like files

This is a RFC for an idea I want to implement in l10n trunk. I think it will make it easier for us i18n dudes and should not affect (or maybe even should help) the developers.

At the moment if you want to have translations in a file that is ".desktop like" but does not have one of the extensions we extract by default (that is *.directory *.desktop *.desktop.cmake *.kimap *.themerc *.kcsrc *.setdlg index.theme *.notifyrc *.protocol *.profile *.actions) you need to go to l10n-kde4/scripts/findfiles and add a line like
find $BASEDIR/`get_path kdebase_kde-workspace`/khotkeys -name \*.khotkeys -print >> $filelist

My suggestion is move the responsibility of listing those files from l10n-kde4/scripts/findfiles to a file in the program itself (that is, a file in similar fashion to Messages.sh). This serves various purposes:
* Make the developer know there is something he needs to keep updated (it's not the first time people move or delete files and the l10n-kde4/scripts/findfiles get outdated)
* Make it easier for l10n maintainers to move things between l10n trunk and l10n stable, since the things are more autocontained and we do not need to worry about what in findfiles will get outdated or not, or might be reintroduced later if someone decides they need a stable branch

So all in all seems a win/win situation for me. What do you guys think?

Join the KDE translation team

This is a reminder that the various KDE Translation teams are always looking for new contributors, so if you always wanted to contribute to KDE but did not know how to do it, this is your chance, join the KDE Translation team!

This is actually a good moment to join, since the KDE software sources that will end up in 4.6 release are frozen for new messages so no new messages are going to be introduced before the release. A second reason is that the release date is close enough (2 month approx until tagging) so you will see your effort released really soon.

You can have a look at the statistics in the l10n web page, but remember that even if the statistics say a team has 100% of the stuff translated, there is always room for reviewing so your help will for sure still be welcome.

So start your e-mail client and contact me at aacid@kde.org so I can redirect you to the proper people that will help you making KDE rock even more :-)

How to run a Messages.sh file to create your .pot file

Some people regularly ask me how to create the .pot file of their program. They know the Messages.sh file is the key for it but they also realize that doing

cd /path/to/my/project
bash Messages.sh

Does not really work and then they are a bit stalled.

The answer is quite simple, but you need to know it ;-) You have to run the extract-messages.sh script that lives in the l10n-kde4/scripts

That still will fail as the script tries to save the .pot files in a folder called "po", so all in all these are the commands to get the .pot file of your project

cd /path/to/my/project
mkdir po
bash /path/to/l10n-kde4/scripts/extract-messages.sh

And that's it :-)

l10n.kde.org: an apology

Yesterday i had a look at the l10n.kde.org database and noticed there were about 300 people that had registered there in the past 4 years to help translating KDE and most probably had not been contacted.

Even if i didn't put the system into place, you guys need an apology, so here it comes: "We are sorry".

Besides saying "oh fuck!" i started mailing them all (some registered like 4 years ago) and this morning i've already got some answers.

Some had managed to overcome the blackhole of not getting any answer and actually contacted the translation team and were already alive and kicking. Good :-)

Some had moved to gnome and obviously are not interested in translating KDE anymore. Bad for us, there's no better way to keep an user that getting him involved

Some others had become KDE developers meanwhile :D

Some people still want to translate. Great!

Most of the address just bounced off though :-/ Lost contributors :-(

So remember if you add a way for people to contact a team, make sure it does not get lost and there is anyone looking at that mailing address, database, forum, mailing list or whatever.

And BTW i'm in the process of killing/reworking the l10n.kde.org database so this does not happen again.

Join the translation crew

Hi, this is a reminder that the KDE Translation teams are always looking for new contributors, so even if you do not know how code you can help translating the KDE Software to your mother tongue or some other language you are fluent in and make a difference.

This is actually a good moment to join, since the KDE Software Compilation 4.5 sources are frozen for new messages so new messages are going to be introduced before the release and also the release date is close enough (1 month approx until tagging) that you will see your effort be released really soon.

One of the teams specially looking for contributors is the Gujarati team, that met the essential requirements to be shipped with KDE SC for 4.4 but does not to 4.5

And remember, even if the statistics say a team has 100% of the stuff translated, there is always room for reviewing so your help will still be welcome.

So start your e-mail client and contact me at aacid@kde.org so i can redirect you to the proper people that will help you making KDE rock even more :-)

Lightning talks at OSS BarCamp

I'll be giving two lightning talks at OSS BarCamp this saturday, one about poppler and other about the KDE localization project. More info at http://www.ossbarcamp.com

Translate!

Hello, this is Albert speaking from my new KDE 4 i18n/l10n coordinator position.

If you have always wanted to help KDE and you have knowledge of a language different than english you can do it! Join today your local Translation team and you will improve your english but also your native language skills :-)

Translations for KDE4.0 are closing in about 12 days but there will be a 4.0.1 so don't worry of being late!

And congrats to Portuguese team that has a 100% translation!