40 Students To Work On KDE During GSoC 2007

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40 Students To Work On KDE During GSoC 2007

Posted by Daniel Molkentin on Wednesday 11/Apr/2007, @17:09
from the summer-of-code dept.
The KDE project is happy to announce the selection of 40 KDE projects for the Google Summer of Code 2007. This is the third consecutive year that KDE is participating in the initiative. Though Thiago Macieira, KDE's Summer of Code co-ordinator, states that reviewing the 213 submissions was difficult, Aaron Seigo, member of the KDE e.V. board, has the "highest confidence in the final list, with ambitious and exciting new technology and functionality set to grace the KDE desktop, which is very fitting with what we are trying to achieve with the KDE 4 vision". Read on for more information about the selected projects.

KDevelop, with five accepted projects, will get support for CMake, and brand new code completion and Ruby language support. Kommander will also be integrated into KDevelop. Another five projects are related to KDE-PIM applications and the new Akonadi PIM data store. With a total of six accepted projects, KOffice will receive a collaborative editing mode, and other accepted applications focus on elements of Krita and KWord.

Other KDE applications receiving new features from students are the Quanta web development editor, the Kopete instant messenger, and the award-winning Amarok mediaplayer. The KDEPrint printer backend will be re-designed and substantially improved, allowing the user to download missing printing drivers automatically. The Marble desktop globe will receive support for GPS and the KML file format (as used by Google Earth) as well as a 2D projection mode. The Strigi desktop search and NEPOMUK, the semantic desktop framework are also both covered by another two Summer of Code projects.

For ongoing reports on the progress of these projects, see future editions of the weekly KDE Commit-Digest.

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Over 40 comments listed. Printing out index only.

Awesome!
by Louis on Thursday 12/Apr/2007, @05:44

These projects are all very exciting. Me, I'm most excited that Urs is going to revamp KRDC. I use it _every day_ at work to manage servers on our Windows network. The proposed tabs would be a huge help. Big thanks from me to Urs and Brad for KRDC, and congratulations to everyone who was accepted, and good luck to all.

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Re: Awesome! by Me on Thursday 12/Apr/2007, @06:51

Re: Awesome! by anon on Thursday 12/Apr/2007, @12:52

Re: Awesome! by Urs Wolfer on Thursday 12/Apr/2007, @13:21

Re: Awesome! by Mike on Thursday 12/Apr/2007, @17:10

Admin consoles.. by Kevin Bowling on Thursday 12/Apr/2007, @22:25
Re: Awesome! by anon on Monday 16/Apr/2007, @12:00

Re: Awesome! by ac on Thursday 12/Apr/2007, @10:28

Re: Awesome! by Urs Wolfer on Thursday 12/Apr/2007, @13:23

Re: Awesome! by ac on Thursday 12/Apr/2007, @23:30

Re: Awesome! by asda on Thursday 12/Apr/2007, @10:32
Re: Awesome! by Urs Wolfer on Thursday 12/Apr/2007, @13:29

Correct & suggest
by Jakob Petsovits on Thursday 12/Apr/2007, @06:14

Actually, there's also a project for Python support in KDevelop, which makes the KDevelop project count go up to five, not four.

Also, I believe that in "instant messanger", the messEnger is actually spelled with an "e", while messAging is spelled with an "a". Hope you don't mind me playing the nit-picker.

Other than that, I'm thrilled to see these projects getting implemented - 40 of them is _really much_, and even if only half of them would finish successfully, it means a tremendous advance for KDE.

Mentors and students, keep in mind that communication is everything. Students have to subscibe to their specific project's mailing list, and should hang out on IRC if possible. In order to finish the project successfully, students must be involved with the actual project, its team members, its conventions, and its current developments. Students who work independently from the "live" code base and plan to merge their improvements at the very end of the program are much more likely to fail than those who get their code into the project in small incremental commits.

Drupal (which also takes part in the Summer of Code) expects a weekly progress report from their students, so that communication is facilitated, progress is encouraged, and most importantly the students are made a genuine part of the community. I find one week a bit short (maybe two could still be enough), but on the whole I think this would be a splendid idea for KDE projects as well. Thiago, think about this.

Oh, and dannya, please don't quote me in the Commit Digest this time ;)

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Re: Correct & suggest by Daniel Molkentin on Thursday 12/Apr/2007, @06:39
Re: Correct & suggest by Sebastian Kügler on Thursday 12/Apr/2007, @10:00

GNOME got at least 19 more projects than us
by Hans on Thursday 12/Apr/2007, @06:20

Let's compare our projects to GNOME's:

The GNOME organization got 29 project, but Google allowed additional GNOME-centric organizaitons to apply independently:

1) AbiSource: 5
2) GNU Project: 2 desktop-related
3) GNUCash: 4
4) Inkscape: 7
5) Maemo: 1 desktop-related
6) OLPC: 4 desktop-related
7) Pidgin (GAIM): 7

So GNOME actually got 59 projects. Seems kind of unfair to me, given that KDE has more users.

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Re: GNOME got at least 19 more projects than us by Daniel Molkentin on Thursday 12/Apr/2007, @06:35

Re: There's a sort of bias by Phase II on Thursday 12/Apr/2007, @08:01

Re: There's a sort of bias by shamaz on Thursday 12/Apr/2007, @08:33

Re: There's a sort of bias by Louis on Thursday 12/Apr/2007, @10:28

Re: There's a sort of bias by Robert on Friday 13/Apr/2007, @02:10

Re: There's a sort of bias by Louis on Friday 13/Apr/2007, @06:31

Re: There's a sort of bias by anonymous-from-linux.org.ru on Saturday 14/Apr/2007, @00:09

Re: There's a sort of bias by Debian User on Thursday 12/Apr/2007, @13:54

Re: There's a sort of bias by Allan Sandfeld on Friday 13/Apr/2007, @02:04

Re: There's a sort of bias by Brad Hards on Friday 13/Apr/2007, @03:23
Re: There's a sort of bias by Thomas Zander on Monday 16/Apr/2007, @08:50

Re: There's a sort of bias by Phase II on Friday 13/Apr/2007, @02:42

Re: There's a sort of bias by Cyrille Berger on Friday 13/Apr/2007, @07:24
Re: There's a sort of bias by she on Saturday 14/Apr/2007, @16:58

Re: GNOME got at least 19 more projects than us by Christian on Friday 13/Apr/2007, @03:48

optimism
by Cliffton on Thursday 12/Apr/2007, @06:36

Sounds like a great list. I can't help thinking that you are being over optimistic though by using "will" all the time. Is there a rundown anywhere of how many SOC projects from last year bore fruit?

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Re: optimism by Troy Unrau on Thursday 12/Apr/2007, @09:50

good!
by alphaman on Thursday 12/Apr/2007, @06:44

Wow, really awensome! Those great projects handly-picked, finely selected, lining up for a good start on a great summer!!! Some of them really strike me, they sound too good to be true :-D
Many many many compliments to all the students involved ^_^.
!! GO GO GSoC-KDE !!

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Revamp of context sensitive help
by cmiramon on Thursday 12/Apr/2007, @07:58

I'm very happy that Joshua Keel will implement the new context sensitive help infrastructure designed by OpenUsability.

Our help system has not evolved much since a long time. With the new design possibilities given by Qt4 and nepomuk, we will have the possibility to create something smarter.

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Re: Revamp of context sensitive help by superstoned on Thursday 12/Apr/2007, @08:09

Re: Revamp of context sensitive help by Vide on Wednesday 18/Apr/2007, @11:31

great !
by shamaz on Thursday 12/Apr/2007, @08:14

These is an exciting list!
And about kdeprint, wine is mentoring a project to use win32 printer drivers from linux ! Well, this is not really related to kde, but that would be AWESOME for my canon printer =)

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Re: great ! by Adrian Baugh on Thursday 12/Apr/2007, @09:55

kpilot AND kitchensync?
by anonymous coward on Thursday 12/Apr/2007, @09:06

Please tell me why both KitchenSync/OpenSync AND kpilot are accepted. It seems they both do the same thing, just that OpenSync has a wider audience as it supports more devices and is platform/desktop agnostic.

I think kpilot has a very limited future, simply because the PalmOS is dying. Even if not, Opensync does have a palm-plugin.

Oh well, I guess everyone is allowed to work on what they want. Sometimes, I'd just like to be the boss of opensource :)

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Re: kpilot AND kitchensync? by Sebastian Kügler on Thursday 12/Apr/2007, @10:04
Re: kpilot AND kitchensync? by Jason 'vanRijn' Kasper on Thursday 12/Apr/2007, @11:12

Re: kpilot AND kitchensync? by Bille on Thursday 12/Apr/2007, @12:21

Spare !?
by asda on Thursday 12/Apr/2007, @10:36

Are these 40 GoC Projects from Students with Spare Time or New Contributors ?

If not, then Progress on KDE would not be faster because they already work on parts on kde, which will get no attention in the meantime.

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Re: Spare !? by Kevin Krammer on Thursday 12/Apr/2007, @10:56

Photorealistic SVG support
by Sagara on Thursday 12/Apr/2007, @11:26

I'm using KDE 3.5.1 and tried this (http://svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/*checkout*/inkscape/inkscape/trunk/share/examples/gallardo.svgz) as a Desktop background. This is a photorealistic SVG image (http://www.inkscape.org/screenshots/gallery/inkscape-0.45-photorealistic-car2.png) but it appears just flat on the desktop.

Does the latest version of the KDE support photorealistic SVG features such as Gaussian Blur? If the KDE still does not support these features, I think its a worthy upgrade to KDE.

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Re: Photorealistic SVG support by pinheiro on Thursday 12/Apr/2007, @12:08

Re: Photorealistic SVG support by Sagara on Friday 13/Apr/2007, @02:56

RandR
by Med on Thursday 12/Apr/2007, @15:25

I can't wait the improved RandR support. Good screen hotplugging will be great, especially when you have to do presentations. Perhaps we will at least be able to do presentations as powerpoint does on os x.

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Not just KDE!
by Hank Miller on Thursday 12/Apr/2007, @17:24

Be sure to check out the other projects that got accepted. While some are uninteresting, many are. For example, gcc got several projects accepted, and since nearly all KDE installs are compiled with gcc, every improvement to gcc is an improvement to KDE (it also helps gnome if you are one of the idiots who thinks you need to keep score)

Be careful before you pass a project off as uninteresting, sometimes a project does something that has a wider scope that you might guess. Wine's printer driver project comes to mind as something that could be awesum if done well. There are plenty of others.

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Pretty nice :)
by Rafael Fernández López on Thursday 12/Apr/2007, @18:49

Really nice proposals here, I hope all they become true. Thanks to everyone involved

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Congrats
by Brian on Thursday 12/Apr/2007, @19:48

Congrats to the students that got their submissions accepted. Thanks to Google for having such a great promotion. And last but certainly not least thanks to all the mentors that will be giving up time and energy to help. This is a great list of projects, we as users should feel very proud.

I'm not a c++/qt programmer, but am a Perl programmer, I'm not a great artists, but good enough to have a couple things accepted into Kalzium, and would like to extend an offer to help out if there are things that I can do. [Read over documentation, write crummy Perl scripts, or produce mediocre graphics. :-) ]

Cheers, and good luck.

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