KDE Applications 17.04 Schedule finalized

It is available at the usual place https://community.kde.org/Schedules/Applications/17.04_Release_Schedule

Dependency freeze is in 4 weeks and Feature Freeze in 5 weeks, so hurry up!

KDE Applications 16.12.0 just out!

See https://www.kde.org/announcements/announce-applications-16.12.0.php for the announcement and https://www.kde.org/announcements/fulllog_applications.php?version=16.12.0 for the reaaaaaaaaally long changelog.

Well done everyone :)

The dangers of stable/LTS/supported versions

Ubuntu 14.04 LTS is supported until April 2019 and ships poppler 0.24.5 http://packages.ubuntu.com/search?suite=trusty&searchon=names&keywords=libpoppler-dev

RHEL 7.3 ships poppler 0.26.5 (I may be wrong, https://git.centos.org/summary/?r=rpms/poppler is the best info i could find, Red Hat does not make easy to know what you're buying)

Debian stable (Jessie) ships poppler 0.26.5 https://packages.debian.org/search?suite=jessie&searchon=names&keywords=libpoppler-dev

Current release is poppler 0.49 https://poppler.freedesktop.org/releases.html

This means that people are running stable versions and thinking they are secure, but if we trust security specialists, [almost] every crash can be exploited, and I'm almost sure neither Ubuntu nor RedHat nor Debian have backported all of the crash fixes of the more than 20 releases and 2 years of development behind those *very old* versions they are shipping.

I don't know how/if this can be fixed, but i honestly think we're giving users a false sense of security by letting them run those versions.

No one "works" on Poppler

I thought that was obvious, but today someone thought that i was "working" as "paid working" on it.

No, I don't get paid for the work i do on Poppler.

It's my computing hobby, and on top of that it's not even my "primary" computing hobby, lots of KDE stuff take precedence over it, and i guess Gnome stuff may also take precedence for Carlos (second top commiter according to the git shortlog)

Aside a few paid contributions and some patches that may have come from people that use the software on their business (and we could file them under "paid" since they did the fix as part of their job) no one has a paid job that is mainly "work on poppler".

I guess we've done a good enough job as hobbyist :)

Obviously we could do better, so if you have lots of money and are interested in making free software PDF rendering beter please hire someone to help us (no, this is not me asking for money, I've a good enough job already).

And if you don't have money but you have some free time and like to help, join us :)

And if you really really have some free time or lots of money you could port Okular, Evince et al to pdfium and see if it's actually better/worse than poppler.

Finding a valid build order for KDE repositories

KDE has been lately been growing quite a bit in repositories, and it's not always easy to tell what needs to be build before, do i build first kdepim-apps-libs or pimcommon?

A few days ago i was puzzled by the same question and realized we have the answer in the dependency-data-* files from the kde-build-metadata repository.

They define what depends on what so what we need to do is just build a graph with those dependencies and get a valid build order from it.

Thankfully python already has a module for graphs and stuff so build-order.py was not that hard to write.

So say you want to know a valid build order for the stable repositories based on kf5-qt5

Here it is

Note i've been saying *a* valid build order, not *the* valid build order, since there are various orders that are valid since not every repo depends other repos.

Now i wonder, does anyone else find this useful? And if so to which repository do you think i should commit such script?

KDE Applications 16.12 branches created

The dependency freeze for KDE Applications 16.12 is on since November 10

For all repositories part of the KDE Applications 16.12 release the Applications/16.12 branch has been created.

The list of modules+branches that will be part of the release is at https://cgit.kde.org/sysadmin/release-tools.git/tree/modules.git?h=Applications/16.12

Please make sure the list is correct. If it's not please email release-team at kde.org *NOW*

From now on master is open for feature changes, but remember that all your fixes also should get to the Applications/16.12 branch (my suggestion, commit fixes to Applications/16.12 and then merge that branch to master)

KDE Applications 16.12 Beta (version number 16.11.80) will be tagged November 17 at 23:59 UTC

Once the Beta is tagged no more features can be added.

KDE Applications 16.12 Schedule finalized

It is available at the usual place https://community.kde.org/Schedules/Applications/16.12_Release_Schedule

Dependency freeze is in 2.5 weeks and Feature Freeze in 3.5 weeks, so hurry up!

I'm going to Akademy :)

I'm coming back home on Tuesday afternoon-ish so if you want to catch me for something be sure to make it before then :)

See you in Berlin!

KDE Applications 16.08 Schedule finalized

It is available at the usual place https://community.kde.org/Schedules/Applications/16.08_Release_Schedule

Dependency freeze is in 2 weeks and Feature Freeze in 3 weeks, so hurry up!

Akademy 2016 travel support

If you want to attend Akademy 2016 but are a bit short on money, that is no excuse :)

Read https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-community/2016q2/002758.html for more info on how the KDE e.V. can help you!

Workaround for trouble with updating akonadi tables

I was just updating the Kubuntu packages that move from akonadi 15.08 to 15.12.1 and sadly akonadi failed to migrate with this error


Adding new foreign key constraints
"ALTER TABLE PimItemFlagRelation ADD FOREIGN KEY (PimItem_id) REFERENCES PimItemTable(id) ON UPDATE CASCADE ON DELETE CASCADE"
Updating index failed:
Sql error: Cannot add or update a child row: a foreign key constraint fails (`akonadi`.`#sql-6ea8_3`, CONSTRAINT `#sql-6ea8_3_ibfk_1` FOREIGN KEY (`PimItem_id`) REFERENCES `pimitemtable` (`id`) ON DELETE CASCADE ON UPDATE CASCADE) QMYSQL: Unable to execute query
Query: ALTER TABLE PimItemFlagRelation ADD FOREIGN KEY (PimItem_id) REFERENCES PimItemTable(id) ON UPDATE CASCADE ON DELETE CASCADE
""
Unable to initialize database.

Bug 354536 will be fixed with the akonadi 15.12.3 release next week.

Lucky meanwhile amazing Dan was ready to help me workaround the issue.

You need to start mysql (if that's what you're using as akonadi backend)
mysqld --defaults-file=$HOME/.local/share/akonadi/mysql.conf --datadir=$HOME/.local/share/akonadi/db_data --socket=/tmp/akonadi-mysql.socket

then connect to it
mysql -S /tmp/akonadi-mysql.socket

And run a series of sql commands
http://paste.ubuntu.com/15344766/

After that shut down mysql
mysqladmin -S /tmp/akonadi-mysql.socket shutdown

And start akonadi and you should be golden again
akonadictrl start

KDE Applications 16.04 Schedule finalized

It is available at the usual place https://techbase.kde.org/Schedules/Applications/16.04_Release_Schedule.

Dependency freeze is in 4 weeks and Feature Freeze in 6 weeks, so hurry up!

KDE dinner in Berlin - October 3

This weekend the KDE e.V. board is going to have an in-person board meeting in Berlin.

We would like you to join us for dinner on Saturday 3 around 19:00 (location still undecided, suggestions accepted).

If you are interested in talking about KDE, KDE e.V., Free Software, Open Source, today's elections in Catalonia or any other random talk and want to have a good time let me know that you're coming (latest by Wednesday night).

September 26: SystemSettings and KCMs bug triaging day!

Today/Tomorrow September 26 is SystemSettings and KCMs bug triaging day.

As described by Jeremy in this post in the KDE Gardening mailing list the purpose is:

1. Triage all bugs in the systemsettings product (and maybe the kcm product too).
2. If a bug is reproducible still, comment on it and find someone that knows how to fix it and convince them to do so.
3. Find maintainers for as many of the kcms as we can.

This is something anyone with a relatively new Plasma installed can help with so join us on September 26 at the #kde-devel IRC channel!

Personally I'll be on from 10am Spanish time until around 4pm with some lunch time in between.

More info at the gardening wiki for SystemSettings

Using git the proper way for correct release changelogs

If you look at kdenlive's changelog for KDE Applications 15.08 and for KDE Applications 15.04.3 you'll see that "Fix autosave not working when opening project file from command line or click in file browser" shows up in both.

On the other hand if you have a look at gwenview, in 15.04.3 it shows "Make saving thumbnails work again" while it's not part of 15.08.

Does that mean that this bug got lost?

No, gwenview is actually the correct thing, we should not mention a bug again for 15.08 if it was released in 15.04.3, since well it's been released already :D

So why does kdenlive, marble and others show commits in the two places?

Because their developers are not doing the proper git-thing of commiting to the oldest supported branch and then merging up to master, so for git it's two different commits instead of the same (in case of the kdenlive commit in question it'd be https://quickgit.kde.org/?p=kdenlive.git&a=commit&h=cc55a9cea5c2f029744f8aba79a362fd302ec0bb and https://quickgit.kde.org/?p=kdenlive.git&a=commit&h=28b3cc7b5141fcc2fed84433b9fe9851c35b7e08).

Commiting the fix to the oldest supported branch and then merging up has lots of other benefits (like making sure you never forget a fix in master), but maybe this is the one that finally convinces more devs to switch to it, nicer changelogs ;)

KDE Workspaces 4.11 End of Life this August

Back in August 2013 we promised to do Long Term Support for kde-workspace for 2 years.

This means this August is the last release for kde-workspace (coming with KDE Applications 15.08.0).

Of course, we can extend the releases if anyone has a strong reason.

If you do, head to the release-team mailing list!

rsibreak port to KF5 started!

I just started the port of rsibreak to KF5.

Contributions at http://quickgit.kde.org/?p=rsibreak.git

Akademy 2015 and Akademy-es 2015 recap

I'm back home after more than a week of talks and hacking in the beautiful city of A Coruña.

There I attended Akademy, the international conference of the KDE Community, and Akademy-es, it's Spanish counterpart.

First off I'd like to thank the local organization, GPUL, that as always has done an amazing job in hosting us, repeating the success of Guademy, Akademy-es 2008, KDE-EDu sprint, etc.

Also kudos to the Scottish-Kenny duo, top notch organizing work as always.

Finally thanks to the both Akademy and Akademy-es sponsors. Specially Qindel, that sponsored us for the first time, hope we can continue the relationship in the future.

The talks this year were specially interesting, I attended some good BoFs on releasing and translation infrastructure, hopefully some improvements coming your way soon :)

Of course not everything is perfect and my biggest pain point this year was that we did not have as much people in Akademy-es as we expected. Akademy-es happened the 2 days before Akademy and this meant that lots of local people from the organization team were helping set up the place instead of attending the talks; also on Friday some of us (I count at least 8) were attending the KDE e.V. General Assembly so couldn't attend Akademy-es either. Definitely something to think about and improve next time Akademy and Akademy-es happen at the same place.

But all in all pretty positive experience as always, nice to meet so many KDE people :)

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)