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!

New full changelogs for KDE Applications releases

With 14.12.0 we've introduced full changelogs for KDE Applications releases; you can see it at https://www.kde.org/announcements/fulllog_applications-14.12.0.php.

To generate this changelog we diff from previous release to the released one and use the commit message with a few annotations for stuff like REVIEW: BUG: etc.

This means the world is now going to see your commits more so spend 3 seconds when writing them instead of 0.5 ;)

If someone wants to improve the page (I'd like to have a checkbox that shows only commits that fix bugs) please contact me :)

The code lives in the release-tools repo (this is probably my longest python script, so be gentle ;))

KDE End of Year Fundraising cards are being sent out!

We ordered some samples to make sure they looked good, and here they are here!

If you want some, we will send them to you as gift if you donate to the KDE End of Year 2014 Fundraising

P.S: If you made a donation that qualifies for a postcard gift before this monday and have not received an email from me asking which design and to which address you want the postcards sent please contact me at aacid@kde.org

Keywords vs X-KDE-Keywords on .desktop files

Seem similar, do they? But they have a *radical* difference, one is "old" (X-KDE-Keywords) and the other is "new" (Keywords). The "new" one is also an xdg standard and as such the separator is ';'. The old one is just a KConfig string list and thus the separator is ','.

Great isn't it?

TL;DR
X-KDE-Keywords uses , for separation
Keywords uses ; for separation

Third design added for the KDE End of Year 2014 Fundraising Campaign!

I hope you know we're running a Fundraiser Campaign in KDE land. As a way to say thank you donors over 30€ get a postcard.

Today we've announced the last of the three designs you can choose as a gift when donating.

Donate and get a physical copy of it ;)

KDE Gardening Love Project: KRecipes

KRecipes has been in 2.0beta since 2010 so we decided it will be our next Love Project.

Objectives:
* We want to release 2.0 "quickly" and then 2.1 in one/two months.
* Migrate https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/krecipes-devel over to kde.org
* Migrate http://krecipes.sourceforge.net/ contents over to https://userbase.kde.org/KRecipes
* Add krecipes group to reviewboard that mails the KDE mailing list
* Add krecipes to jenkins that mails the kde.org mailing list
* Make sure bugs/reviewboards are defaulted to kde.org and go thorugh
* Port some of the Qt3Support code (make sure don't break stuff) :D

We will be updating this list at https://community.kde.org/Gardening/KRecipes

If you want to join the initiative please join the KDE Gardening mailing list and announce yourself :)

K3b 2.0.3 released

K3b 2.0.3 can be downloaded from http://download.kde.org/stable/k3b/k3b-2.0.3a.tar.xz

I don't have access to k3b.org so can't update the news there, shows why the Manifesto is such an important thing.

Changelog since 2.0.2:
* Fixed crash in MetaItemModel on submodel item removal
* Fixed Solid predicates for AudioCd and VideoDvd media. BUG: 265819
* Set error status when CDDB query fails.
* Prefer growisofs to wodim for DVD/BluRay burning.
* Fixed improper track number in CDDB track edit window title. BUG: 276681
* Fixed crash on detecting writing speeds. BUG: 272427
* Fix problem with HL-DT-ST BH10LS30. BUG: 268307
* Fixed compilation with new FFMPEG. BUG: 274817 BUG: 300731
* Allow using CD-R90 and CD-R99 media to full capacity. BUG: 276002
* Refactor the FreeBSD SCSI/CAM interface.
* Fix crash on dvd ripping
* fix sox detection with sox >= 14.4.0. BUG: 301544
* Support more media types. BUG: 261652
* Fix file system detection. BUG: 325616 BUG: 262607
* Surround output filename for transcode with double quotes. BUG: 326097
* Fix FILE name and type detection for cue sheet images. BUG: 337201
* Rip audio tracks in ascending numerical order. BUG: 319678
* Upstream patches from NetBSD.
* Make paranoia lib detection better.
* Don't preview if called process failed. BUG: 268680
* Fix Crash while remove songs in "Mixed mode CD proyect". BUG: 323117
* Use QElapsedTimer to calculate remaining time. BUG: 330239 BUG:315463
* Fix crash in lsof wrapper. BUGS: 340515

This marks the end of the "Gardening Love Project", I'll still be subscribed
to the k3b list but won't do any more than some lurking

I think someone should stand up and start thinking for a 2.1 release.

New postcard design added for the KDE End of Year 2014 Fundraising Campaign!

You probably know we're running a Fundraiser Campaign in KDE land. As a way to say thank you donors over 30€ get a postcard.

Today we've announced the second of three designs we are planning.

Donate and get a physical copy of it ;)

KDE Gardening Team: K3b

As mentioned on other KDE Gardening Team bugs we are focusing on getting K3b 2.0.3 release out.

The release will be on 4th November if all goes to plan.

Also we are going through the bugs doing two things:

• Checking if it still happens and asking people to give more info if needed

For bugs that are easy enough to reproduce (i.e. they do not involve having 13 CD burners or writing 50GB of data to a BlueRay disc) we are trying to reproduce them and if we can't ask the reporter for more information while setting the bug status to NEEDSINFO+WAITINGFORINFO

• Classifying it regarding it's gardening potential

For bugs that we can reproduce or we think they have enough information we are classifying them in three groups using the gardening flag in bugzilla "+" for crashes that are really critical to be fixed before the release[1], "?" for bugs that seem to be relatively easy and someone could pick up and fix if has time but are not a problem if not fixed, and "-" for bugs that are out of the scope of the gardening initiative. Being out of scope of the gardening initiative doesn't mean the bug is more or less valid, it just means that it is not for the gardeners or not very involved people to fix this bug and requires people with more commitment.

You can visit https://community.kde.org/Gardening/K3b for the relevant bugzilla links.

[1] This should be a mostly empty list since we already have 2.0.2 out and doesn't make sense to delay 2.0.3 until a bug is fixed given 2.0.3 will be already better than 2.0.2

Make the World a Better Place! - KDE End of Year 2014 Fundraising

At KDE sometimes we focus in the technical parts of Free Software. This is understandable since most of us are technical people doing a technical job.

But KDE also has a huge social impact, thanks to KDE there's schools that can teach touch typing , there's people out there that can do their accounting, there's business that can fill their taxes. KDE does provide quality software for all the world to use, making it a better place for all of us.

Donating to KDE is not for you, it is for the entire world.

As a way to say thank you, starting with € 30 KDE e.V. will send a KDE themed postcard to any given address. You will get an extra card for every additional € 10 donation.

More at https://www.kde.org/fundraisers/yearend2014/

Plasma 5.1 release parties!

Plasma 5.1 is coming up in less than a month, we have already two release parties in the planning, but i'm sure you have some fellow KDE users around you want to meet and have a beer with, so hop onto your local LUG, meetup, or something, organize a party and add it to https://community.kde.org/Promo/Events/Release_Parties/Plasma5.1

The KDE Gardening Team

At Akademy I did a short talk (8 min) + herded a BoF with a title called "Quality is in the eye of the beholder".

One of the topics was that we should try to get a team of people to care about the global state of KDE software, we've decided to call this "The Gardening Team".

The mandate of the team is to:
# Find *really* important bugs and ping people to fix them
# Find stale reviewboards and ping people to fix them
# Bugzilla gardening, close old products etc
# Find projects that need love and give them some

For that we have various ideas:

Try to find monthly a bug to get people to fix it, by highlighting it as "The Bug of The Month" or something. Of course this bug can't be stuff like "Make Okular support javascript", it has to be something that is really a pain point of the whole user base and we think we can find people to fix it, it makes no sense setting impossible goals ;)

Do routine passes over reviewboard trying to identify stale requests and finding people to help moving those.

Run something called "Love Project". The idea is to pick up a project that is somewhat stale, and for a short amount of time (let's say 2/3 months) try to get a new release out, fix the most important crashers/bugs, get the review boards released, etc. This goal of the team is *not* becoming the maintainers of the project, but maybe by virtue of the "Love Project" we can attract new contributors that decide to.

Since we're only a few maybe we can't do this all, so we're focusing on a particular "Love Project" by now, but you should join and help us do more!

Our current Love Project is K3b, that had 2.0.2 released a long time ago and has a 2.0 branch with a few more bugfixes that have been never released.

We are coordinating through https://todo.kde.org/?controller=board&action=show&project_id=26 at the moment but plan to get a mailing list soon (or invade an unused existing one).

If you're interested, comment and i'll give you a shout when the list is created, no mega skills are needed (though people with mega skills are also welcome ;))

KDE Applications 14.12 Release Schedule

The schedule for KDE Applications 14.12 release is ready. As always it's available in techbase at https://techbase.kde.org/Schedules/Applications/14.12_Release_Schedule.

The Freeze is only one month away!