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!

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.