In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Marble gets "temperature" and "precipitation" maps, and a "stars" plugin. More work on "fuzzy searches" in Digikam. Konqueror gets support for crash session recovery and session management. Runners can now be managed using a KPluginSelector-based dialog, and attention-blinking support in Plasma. Various Plasma applets move around KDE SVN before the KDE 4.1 feature freeze takes effect, with WebKit applet support moving into kdebase. SVG stuff from WebKit starts to be integrated into KHTML. More optimisations in KHTML, with KJS/Frostbyte, a version using bytecode and other enhancements, moving back into kdelibs. Start of an implemention of the JavaScript scripting API for PDF documents in Okular, based on KJS. Continued work on KJots integration into Kontact, and creating/editing links between entries in KJots. More work on theming in Amarok 2. Various improvements in kvpnc. More configuration user interfaces in KNetworkManager. Enhancements in the KTorrent bandwidth scheduler plugin. Support for CUPS printing options in KDE printing dialogs. Mailody moves to kdereview. The "OnlineSync" plugin is merged into Akregator. Initial commit of a new MSWord-to-ODF filter for KWord, and a caligraphy tool for Karbon. KDevMon is ported to KDE 4. Development of the Shaman2 package manager is moved into KDE SVN (playground/sysadmin). The PHP-Qt bindings move from playground/bindings to the kdebindings module. KDE 4.1 Beta 1 is tagged for release. Read the rest of the Digest here.
Comments
I'm going to preempt some comments here...
I am aware that i'm still a month behind on these Digests, and that my attempts to catch up last weekend didn't fully get the job done.
However, i'm in full time employment this summer, which is pretty tiring in itself. And i've had and still have other stuff to do in the tangible world.
But, this is a matter of priority for me, and i'm trying my best to catch up as soon as possible.
Danny
Hey Danny give Danny a break! Danny's volunteering his time ya know, Danny.
Time to go take my Lithium now...
"I'm going to preempt some comments here..."
Ain't gonna get nothing but luurve from me, baby! You go ahead and take your time :)
I love the digest, so by all means do whatever it takes to keep yourself from burning out.
Do you need help?
No worries! Good work!
I like the slacKer with a capital K!
Perhaps a strategy to catch up would be to just do a high level commit digest of just some important bits for the last month. No commit-level detail, just some general efforts that have been going on in the last month in one digest...
1) Love the slacKer with a kapital K ;)
2) You could use some help. Don't burn yourself out.
I just want to tell you something.
Couple years back I moved to France for 11 months, didn't know the language, anyone in there, and for the first two months my only access to Internet - to keep me at least somewhat sane - was in an Internet café, where I visited about once a week or so. And besides reading my mail (which there never was too much), how did I use that time? By reading carefully about the developments of KDE4 (and 3) from the KDE Commit-Digest...
Just wanted to tell you that you are doing an important work here :-) I understand that it is a taxing, and since I hope you will be making it in to undetermined future, my wish is that you don't wear yourself up with it. So relax :-)
thanks for all your efforts. how can we help you to share the work. is that possible?
> i'm trying my best to catch up as soon as possible.
you're doing great; i'm enjoying them as they arrive, lag or not =)
Old digests are like wine ;)
Do people really read the selected commit messages? They must be a lot of work to select, and while the summary and the interviews are interesting even for non-developers (what I am), the commit messages are far too much to read, and, especially bug fixes, are not interesting. And bugs in which one is interested can be tracked in the bugzilla. Wouldn't it be worth omitting the selected commits part if it took less time that way?
#2
I read the commit messages. I skip the projects that I don't use, but read the messages for the ones I do so that I can see what's coming down the pipe. It's nice to see when bugs get fixed or what features are being worked on.
Sure, it would take a lot less time that way, but I wouldn't know what happened in that week then, and so there wouldn't really be a summary to speak of ;)
And though I know that not everyone reads the selected commits, it's still nice to have.
Danny
Danny, a suggestion: maybe an option could be added to the digest, so that the comments for individual commits are hidden by default?
Then by clicking a button / link for a particular commit in the list reveals the comment. Thinking this would help keep the overall length of the digest down in the browser window, whilst still allowing people to view the comments for the commits they are interested in.
I know your a busy guy. If you think its a worthwhile idea I could have a go at implementing this myself - drop me a line at [email protected].
Can I just add my voices to the others on this board - thanks for doing such a superb job with the digest! I read it every week - its excellent! :)
-=+Steve+=-
You are being manipulated. It is a plot. Or at least it was when I did the digest.
The commit comments contain links to patches. It allows, even encourages readers to look at code, learn to read it. Eventually learn to produce patches.
It is an evil subliminal message that focusses on the developer and development process, and has the evil potential of motivating people to write code.
I'm not sure that is allowed any more in KDE, but there it is.
Derek
Is this meant to be a joke? ;) I can't imagine that linking to patches is considered _evil_.
"Is this meant to be a joke? ;)"
Yes; Derek used to write the Digest before Danny took over :)
I definately need to check this out, especially now that KOffice is going multiplatform. I'm forced to use OOo on Windows boxes currently.
As I wrote in the commit message, it's not actually enabled yet, but hopefully I'll enable it soon. It's still very much a work-in-progress.
The PHP-Qt bindings move from playground/bindings to the kdebindings module. KDE 4.1 Beta 1 is tagged for release.
OK, that made my day!
On other parts, my impression is that KDE4.X started a little slow, but the train is now gaining power and letting the vapor behind. Overall, I'm starting to get impressed by quality of KDE apps, even plasma is starting to become solid and nice.
Just one question: KDE4 overall seems to use more space in screen than KDE3 (but later betas are diminishing that, I have to say). Is there a plan do deal with small screen devices like EeePC 701, HP 2133, Dell-E, Cellphones and the likes?
It would be great if there was an option to use the minimum resolution as possible in a way windows fit the screen... But I do admit I do not have a good suggestion (mine of using qss was rejected) to use here :-(
As always, thanks Danny :)
To use KDE4 on a small screen have been thinked. MID will be a plateform where KDE4 will be cool to use. And you can do it now :) :
- use a small, space saving theme (sorry but oxygen wont do it...)
- use the plasma ability to scale it-self
- use smaller font
And voila
Even, plasma is already ready for touch-screen only device. (You know the hated cashew is there for that)
So I dont see any problem to do it now with the lastest beta.
yours,
Seb
The oxygen style does not support smaller screens (as it does not support many other cool things), but theme engines such as Skulpture (see kdelook.org) are beautiful, polished and support small resolutions. Eg. margins are adjusted to font sizes...
Yes, I can do that, BUT, there are some apps that do not behave well under small resolutions.
I can tell about kmenuedit (at least in the kde3 version) that simply do not fit screen, using a LOT of white spaces all around. Kcontrol, in the other hand, does a fine job inclosing kcmsheels with scroll bars in the case those do not fit.
It is not that hard to think, test and develop for small resolutions, but it must be a global effort of whole KDE packages.
But I'm not saying that KDE itself must focus on small screen, if you look at examples we have now, we'll see the write-once fit-all is not true:
- microsoft have windows-ce/mobile and windows xp for small fit job
- apple developed a system for iPhone that just resembles OSX, but uses much less spacing
If KDE apps just used QtDesigner ui files we could rearranje the UI elements to fit, I would gladly give a hand, but it do not seem to be the case.
SO, in a general way, do KDE team/developers want help in this case?
What I can do it little, but maybe helpfull:
- run all KDE apps and try to resize the window to the minimum necessary space that fits all widgets
- note all apps that when resized to small sizes, add scrollbars to deal with it
- do all metrics and see what apps need adjusts
- propose solutions, find places that can use less space where we can remove hardcoded spacing for qtspacers that auto-adjust to windows size
If you have any interest, and think it's worth the work, I and will be glad to help :)
Patches to fix those problems are generally welcome, but it depends a lot on the actual changes if the patch can get merged.
Do also think of translation (German makes most texts longer, for example). Furthermore, not all applications are using UI files. The preferred thing to do is replace the hardcoded UI with a designer-generated UI file.
You could also think of creating a KStyle for small resolutions.
>You could also think of creating a KStyle for small resolutions.
Yep, I'm working on that, learning how to code a small (very small) style :)
Agreed about translations and ui being hardcoded (I've already said that in the previous post). But there is still a lof of empty spaces that can be eliminated and can't be dealt only thought a theme.
Look at this:
http://markus.wernig.net/en/it/kmenuedit.png
I think it's a good example. Having a lot of boxes (more clear here: http://markus.wernig.net/en/it/Screenshot.png), just uses space without need.
What I think could be done, is placing run in terminal and run as different user in an "advanced" button that would open another small window with those options.
Or, you could always put scrollbars in the window in the case it does not fit resolution. Having windows bigger than the screen is much worse than having to scroll, IMHO.
The space is a function of the Oxygen theme, not the toolkit or platform, using a different theme reduces the space used. I'm happily running KDE4 on my EEE and the flexibility of Plasma is brilliant for such devices, just as Aaron intended when he designed it (something most people forget when they moan about the state of plasma). There's also a GSOC project looking at the wider issues in KDE with Small Form Factor devices, such as dialog sizes, etc.
John.
Good to hear, BUT, not all can be solved with the theme. There are apps that do not take resolution in account and places a lot of dialogs one under other, take kmenuedit for an example.
I do think Plasma is better than kdesktop/kicker for this matter, but I do not know about kde apps. I will measure minimal window sizes this weekend and publish, even that it is useless, ate least I will be able to say if it's better or worse :)
..some moderation. I am happy to see that some comments have beeen removed. Really, some posts were starting to eat our brains, distracting our work and producing nothing useful - unless frustration is considered any use.
thanks for the moderation, i am unhappy that it became necessary, but it is. a reader directed mod up & mod down a la slashdot or digg might fix the situation as well. but i guess if any of us knew how to implent it at the dot, it would have been done already.
I find it sad, that ist has come so far. But it ist really nessesary.
Yes, you're right. It is necessary to silence those who ask questions, as asking questions is dangerous because it leads to thought and introspection.
I'll reply to this one, since I'm deleting comments on this post. It is not to silence those that ask questions, it is to silence those that do not treat others as human beings. Invoking Godwin's law is pretty much guaranteed to get comments deleted at this point, so is overt rudeness. KDE is not going to encourage people to stop asking questions, or posting about problems. We are going to encourage people to do exactly that, but in a civilized fashion. There will be other changes happening to the KDE community.
This whole thing is unfortunate as the dot was one of the last outposts of unmoderated speech on the internet.
Cheers
Moderation and censorship are different things. In many moderated message boards posts are not deleted and any user is free to have a "non-moderated" experience - best of both worlds.
It's not unfortunate that moderation seems to be needed. What is unfortunate is that post are being censored.
We've decided to put the contributions of members of our community above the privilege for everybody to say whatever, whenever on the Dot.
Hello,
well put Sebas and I fully concur. I guess, we have to see it as part of the success and failure of KDE that these things started to happen.
Success as in many more people than before are interested in KDE progress.
Failure as in delivering a more clear view of what people can and can not expect from KDE, and how to influence it in a forum like this one.
My assumption is that way too many people believe that posting about bugs here is somehow the only way to get them fixed. It also seems some people want an interactive forum to talk about concrete bugs. Probably dot.kde.org could feature high profile bugs that don't get fixed proactively in articles, and explain why they are not fixed, while deleting pseudo bug reports in comments to other kinds of articles.
Way too many people just don't understand why small things can become hard to achieve. But when was the last time, any KDE developer took the time to explain it to normal people?
There are people here that believe insults are appropiate. That is very unfortunate. I personally would ask for the impeachment of the KDE president, but I won't, as I don't see the alternative. But insults are really bad and should be banned. Any ad hominem attack leads to waisted emotions and time by the involved parties.
But deep down, I think that is because of the lack of explaining how else to influence the process. People do want to influence and talk is cheap. Make a better case of explaining how comments get nothing done if they are insults, but the contrary. Then people may still decide that the alternative involves too much time, but many probably will choose to stop flames, when they get reminded of the effect periodically.
Where does KDE lay down the ethics of Free Software, and where does it say, what users can expect from it? All I see is how professional, perfect, etc. KDE wants to be, and no pointing out, of shortcomings to be expected. That is a serious mistake. People do not want to be poisonous, not all at least. I think the majority of those that behave this way, just don't understand what is happening with them and their victims, and esp. developers.
With the source open, what's missing is explanation to the people, what this actually means. And how it's not suddenly making everybody solve their pet problems for them.
And talking about fights: Personally, I was rather astounded (and unable to comment so far) to see that with all Plasma - design, and goodies - the good old desktop (icons and background image) won't be possible before 4.2. That was breath taking news. Not because I would use that (in fact I disable kdesktop always, no image, no icons, never look at it), but because I am so surprised and taken by that.
And was there any kind of statement that says, how this could even potentially have any reasons that go in the direction of possible error, mistake, inability or unavailablity of anyone? Nah, it was a semi-troll blog posting, that made people that didn't read well beyond the headline and look beyond the screenshot, that desktop icons were removed. And then there were comments answered aggressively and with a bold tone that seemed to imply, that those who failed to understand, were at fault or even poisonous.
When was the last time any KDE developer said in public: I made a mistake. I have made a wrong plan. I forgot that. I think a lot less frequent that what I can expect it to have happened.
In the above case, I would have found one more reason to admire that developer if he had said: "Look, we are working on it, but we won't finish it. For this reason, backgrounds of widgets can't be images yet. And this is why we didn't think of this as important yet. And probably I am sorry, or I don't care." But no nothing like that. All Plasma is perfect plan and reality, from 4.0.0 on, because then we were told we couldn't judge the untested Plasma before the final release, but not via release candidates.
To me, one more reason to impeach the KDE president, for loosing perspective.
So there is a tension, that I feel too. I am sort of disappointed for not having any discussion about what went wrong, what can be learned from it, etc. for a long time now.
But if KDE developers make no mistakes, how are users to understand their role correctly? How can they help anyway, if others know that they themselves know it better in advance?
I sense that the KDE developers and users lost contact. Instead of taking time to explain how KDE 4 is going to be time taking, features were hyped that never came to existance (without mentioning those that came into existance instead).
Now people seem to think that telling everybody how KDE 4.1 will be great is any good. It is not. We KDE should be busy telling everybody how and why KDE 4.1 is not yet great, and why not. And what the plan is to actually get a KDE 4 that is as great as the KDE 3 managed to be.
Yours,
Kay
> I personally would ask for the impeachment of the KDE president, but I won't, as I don't see the alternative.
KDE does not have a president, it doesn't even have any kind of governmental body.
In case you are referring to Aaron Seigo he is a member of the board and president of the KDE e.V.
Since I can't remember anyone of the e.V. membership voicing any complain about Aaron being on the board or being the e.V.'s president, I can only assume that you are not a member.
In which case you can't know that a huge majority of actual members voted for him to be in this positions and continue to support this descisions.
Hello,
that "impeachment" part was intended to be a funny. I call Aaron "KDE president", and I think he well deserves such a title, although I realize it's only KDE e.V. that has such a role.
Like I said, he should be president for lack of better alternative.
I only wish there was a sense for being _open_ besides where there are pretty screenshots and big achievements, but also in moments of failure to achieve goals. Or in the alternative, provided all goals were met all the time, better communication about the actual goals that will be and have been achieved for releases.
Otherwise users are only treated as cheering crouds, rather than friends. In the case of Plasma, I concur that not all discussion, or not even a reasonable part of the discussion, was contributing to any kind of improval of the situation. I sincerly view this situation as unacceptable, but I only see a key in Aarons hands.
For lack of cheering crouds, it could be that the feedback became overly detrimental to his motivation. But I want to put to record, that I am entirely convinced, that Plasma was miscommunicated (to users) for the largest part of its planning stage and implementation, and that for this problem, and almost only that, users are confused and in part even (unrightfully so) angry.
Please improve communication about what can be expected and what not. How to behave and how not.
Yours,
Kay
> that "impeachment" part was intended to be a funny.
you really need to work on your delivery, because it really didn't come across as very funny at all.
> I only wish there was a sense for being _open_
this is a mischaracterization.
case in point: i find the whole idea of a traditional application menu to be outdated and silly. people harassed me endlessly to make one. (as if i owed them something?)
i stated repeatedly that i didn't really want to write one, that it was perfectly possible for someone else to do so and thus was very low on my priority list.
after dealing with endless and often extremely bitter responses i finally made it very clear that not only did i not want to write it, that i had finally just removed it from my TODO list altogether.
(hint: i am not your slave, and give to those that i feel like giving to.)
Sebastian Sauer stepped up at that point and wrote one, using the Kickoff internals. he posted it for inclusion and go the thumbs up immediately from the team (including myself).
so there's an example of something i not only couldn't care about, but eventually came to completely ignore to the point of stating i wouldn't do it and someone else came along, did the work and it made it into 4.0
that's probably one of the more extreme examples i can think of.
another might be the way layouting was done in 4.0. i really, really didn't like the approach, stated so on the mailing list, but agreed to try it as an experiment. turned out i was pretty much right, and in 4.1 we were able to switch to WoC anyways.
there are many other less extreme examples, of course, that demonstrate the same sort of openness.
there are also examples where i stick to my guns.
that's normal and natural. and i'm much less of a prick about my thoughts / ideas than many other maintainers out there in free software land in the process.
as for all the "they don't take public responsibility" statements in your earlier posting to this thread, i suggest you go back and read the various advisories from the project about 4.0, go see all the bug reports we've closed with patches on code we've written (don't see us shirking that, do you?) or every time i or someone else has said, "i was wrong" on a mailing list.
while i don't see the need for constant public grovelling, people do tend to be pretty honest and frank here, both about success and failure. meanwhile, commentators and held to exactly zero standards.
i'd also suggest that in all your text above, you've completely missed the context of people such as myself having to deal with the ability for a handful of people to rant, whinge, do and say hurtful things with no counter reaction for years now (yes, before 4.x even). when you add in everything that happened, it's a rather different picture that gets painted from what you presented.
As someone who goes on the record of blasting Kickoff, I'm not opposed to a new menu. I'm really looking forward to trying out Raptor. I just find that the interface slows me down considerably in navigation, plus I can only see a few items at a time.
Search is nice, but Krunner has search now.
I'd love to see an evolutionary menu, but I think Kickoff isn't quite it.
Hello Aaron,
all "your" trouble with that comes from the fact that the user community is uneducated about what it can expect and what not from a developer.
It's entirely obvious to a lot of people that you are not the person that must implement any specific feature. But why doesn't KDE communicate that fact all the time to its users? Why should individual developers fight this in their blogs and comments here? How are people supposed to know?
It would be much better to have something abstracted from concrete situations, that explains to users what works and doesn't work with developers. And tells users when to educate their fellow users about wrong attitude, with information to point to.
Yours,
Kay
PS: I love to recall your fight about "Usability" and the good change it brought to the community very well. Just one of many good things (other than code) on your list. That call for impeachment is funny, because it pretends power of users over developers that luckily doesn't exist.
> Sebastian Sauer stepped up at that point and wrote one, using the Kickoff internals.
Not exactly correct since (at least most of) the work was done by our unique Robert :-) I just did saw the need for it, put it on my todo-list and started to implement it while letting others know about that and someone else fast faster and did a better job there. So, it's also a good sample of coperation and that the best way to achieve something is just to do. Someone said once something very wise; FOSS is about being able to do it your own rather then forcing others to do it.
"I only wish there was a sense for being _open_ besides where there are pretty screenshots and big achievements, but also in moments of failure to achieve goals. Or in the alternative, provided all goals were met all the time, better communication about the actual goals that will be and have been achieved for releases. Otherwise users are only treated as cheering crouds, rather than friends."
If a friend fails to achieve something you expected you don't berate them and say "but you promised me!!! how dare you!!!! you owe me!!" you say "shit happens, next time" and move on. You trust that they did their best and, given time, will hit the mark. Aaron's mentioned elsewhere in this thread that the developer-user interaction had veered well away from 'best friends' to feeling more like an 'abusive relationship' - where the community made demands and berated the results whatever their form.
The alternative is not worshipful thanks for every shiny widget but a realistic appreciation of the time effort and goodwill of the developers/contributors for what they produce.
Yes, we need openness and friendship - but in both directions.
> Or in the alternative, provided all goals were met all the time, better communication about the actual goals that will be and have been achieved for releases.
Unfortunately this has been tried and failed, as we can see on the topic of folderview.
When the folderview came around all developer immediately got that this indeed allowed whole new set of usage patterns while still keeping the primitive one-local-folder-fullscreen available as well.
Obviously it is easier for developers to understand the implications of something since they tend to think along similar paths, so after some initial misunderstanding that a folderview would always just be a windowed area on the desktop, Aaron showed explicitly that a single folderview could be switched into fullscreen mode however at this point couldn't draw a wallpaper but would be able to once feature freeze had been lifted.
At this point anyone still claiming that the usual primitive icons-on-desktop should probably have been ignored since they obviously didn't want to do even simple abstractions like "if it can display a check board pattern now, it will be able to draw an image once this is implemented".
Now Aaron is a really nice guy and even did a screencast to make it even more obvious and no longer require any kind of intellectual exercise, but since at this point we are already dealing with trolls, it couldn't have any positive impact anymore, just making everybody else feeling frustrated with those few people's extreme ignorance.
It's a pity that the resulting message to developers is that they are no longer welcome to release early, to no longer involve users in the development process, to eventually restrict dicussions to "inner circles".
What a shame, I really liked the special relationship between users and developers in Free Software, both as a user and as a developer.
Hello,
as it's now impossible to link the actual articles, I will have to rely on my memory, and my perception, both of them limited in quality.
While I understood the good and bad news immediately (but not why this was not the initial plan, how else was kdesktop supposed to be replaced?), the topic appeared to me as semi-trolling itself. I believe it said something like "desktop icons are no more" and later "I removed..." and pardon me, that was not helping people to understand.
I sincerely believe that developers must keep their users in mind in communication and try to avoid such pitfalls. If you try catching the eye with provocative news lines (it's my assumption that was done) may just as well toggle the brains off to some people (also my assumption reading the comments back then).
And you know, about that friendship part, friends help friends. I think you need to educate some of your user friends to do the explaining part. I am entirely sure people will defend Aaron on his behalf, if they only know what is acceptable and what not, and where to point to for wrong expectations, wrong facts, etc.
More I less, why do developers have to defend themselves once they managed to get all the facts out? Why can't users explain things to users too? So far none of the KDE developers invited and encouraged that.
Yours,
Kay
It is _not_ necessary to silence questions. It _is_ necessary to silence those who try to tell the developers what to do (the developers aren't being paid) or who's statements boil down to the rather useless "THIS SUCKS!" (that's just your opinion, and probably contrary to the whole design).
Before you send a load of vitriol my way, I have never, not ever said anything like that to any of the developers or anyone on the Dot. I was asking a simple question and lo and behold, my comments got removed. It was honest inquiry; if you load up Aaron's blog you get a message saying you can't read it unless invited--no explanation, no nothing! What is one to think, especially if they're not subscribed to mailing lists or read the Planet religiously?
I'm being 100% serious here, point out where I was saying "Aaron sucks! Plasma sucks! You're doing it wrong!" and I will apologize profusely.
As I understand Aaron closed his blog to the world because he finally ran out of energy to constantly deal with the unconstructive nej-sayers and poisonous jerks, that tend to attack everything that's about vision and enthusiasm.
I don't really care if you were part of this problem, but seeing your reaction I guess you're feeling kind of guilty. And you seem to assume a conspiracy against you personally just everywhere, as you insinuate that Aaron closed his blog to exclude you from information or something.
Hello,
I cherish being anonymous here, but I think it's obvious that Aaron thinks (correctly so I guess) that people will probably be more gentle when they are not as anonymous.
Aaron: You probably should re-read that "desktop icons removed" blog and consider how it probably was semi-trolling.
Yours,
Kay